Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 (16 page)

Chenaya took a heavy purse from the place where it rested between her leather armor and her tunic. It jingled as she passed it over. Leyn weighed it, considering, frowning, chewing the end of his mustache.

Zip pressed forward impatiently. "Move it, man, while you've still got a hand to count with!" The others, too, pressed forward, demonstrating that the gate would be breached whether the guard was satisfied or no.

"You sure it's all here?" Leyn grunted. "Then inside, and damn you all, and damn the filthy Beysibs." He tugged the gate wide and stood out of the way, waving them in with a bow full of mockery. "Blood to you this night, gentlemen, much blood."

Chenaya led them, hurrying, crouched low, across the courtyard toward the governor's roses, toward a small entrance in the western palace wall. She had come here once before, her first week in Sanctuary, to save Kadakithis from an assassin. By this very way she had come. She found that a bitter irony. Because she listened for the sound, she heard the gate close behind them, heard the sturdy iron lock click into place.

Zip heard it, too. His sword slid serpent-quick from the sheath as all around them shadows rose up from the ground where they had rested flat in the gloom. There was horror in his eyes when he faced her, and anger. But worst of all was the look of betrayal. In an instant, he knew her for what she was, and she knew he knew.

That didn't stop her. Furiously, Zip lunged, his point seeking her heart. Chenaya side-stepped, drew her gladius. In the same back-handed motion she smashed the pommel against his brow as he passed her. The rebel leader fell like a stone at her feet and didn't move.

"Sorry, lover," she muttered honestly, meeting the nearest man with balls enough to try avenging Zip. Blades clashed in a high arc, then she dropped low and raked her edge over his unarmored belly. As he doubled, screaming, she cut upward through his throat.

A manic yell went up from the PFLS as her gladiators crashed into their ranks, hacking at their foes. The Rankans let out their own cry, a vengeful paean full of rage for all their slain kindred. There was no mercy in them and no thought of surrender in Zip's band. Blades clashed and clanged, throwing blue-white sparks. Blood fountained, thick and black in the night. Cries and groaning and grunting filled the palace ground. Walegrin's men came running. Then hell erupted. All around, flame spumed upward. Within the bright geyser a Rankan screamed, threw his arms up uselessly, and ran like a crazed demon trailing fluttering fire.

Another incendiary exploded. Fire spread like a deadly liquid across the earth. Rankans and PFLSers alike shrieked and burned. Someone ran screaming toward her, swathed in fire. Foe or one of her own, she couldn't tell, but she gave him a quicker death.

She had thought to stay by Zip, to guard and keep him alive through this carnage. But now she whirled about, searching for the bomber. He was the paramount threat.

She spied him then, as he lobbed yet another bottle of the strange fluid. The flash dazzled her vision; heat seared the left side of her face. The smell of singed hair crept malodorously into her nostrils-her own hair, she realized with a start. And though she knew she could not die thus-Savankala himself had shown her the manner of her death-in that moment she tasted a small bite of fear. She gripped her sword more securely and started toward him. But the bomber's eyes snapped suddenly wide; his mouth opened in a horrible scream. His hands went up as if to supplicate the heavens. Then, he toppled forward, dead.

Daphne eyed her mistress across the courtyard, her sword running red with the bomber's blood, a mad grin spreading over her small face. Knowing Chenaya watched, the Rankan princess threw back her dark-haired head and laughed obscenely. Again and again she hacked at the body until the torso was a scarlet mass.

Chenaya glanced over her shoulder at the palace. Lights flared in the windows where darkness had been before. Heads peered out at the slaughter. Armed Beysibs, barely dressed, surged out to join the tumult.

It ended quickly after that. Gladiator, garrison soldier, naked Beysib looked around for new foes and found none. Taciturn as ever, the fish-folk wiped their blades on whatever was at hand and went back to bed. Walegrin gave orders; his men began to drag away the corpses.

Leyn rushed to Chenaya's side and returned her pouch of gold. He had thrown aside the sentry's helm or lost it in the conflict. His curly blond hair shone with the glow of the fires that still burned. "Mistress," he said softly, "we lost two of our own." He told her the names.

Chenaya drew a deep breath. "Fire or sword?" she asked. Leyn turned his gaze away. "One to each."

She winced, full of grief for the one who had burned. It was no way for a warrior to die. "If you can, get the bodies from Walegrin. We'll give funeral rites ourselves at Land's End and scatter their ashes on the Red Foal." Leyn moved away to carry out her order. Alone for a moment, Chenaya fought back tears of anger. All of her gladiators were hand-picked men, all completely loyal to her, and she had led two of them to their deaths. Death itself was nothing new to her, but this responsibility for other men's lives was. Suddenly, she found it a heavy yoke to bear.

She gazed up at the sky, wishing Sabellia would come to brighten up her world. There were but twelve links on her chain now-no, only ten. But soon there would be a hundred. One hundred bonds to bind her.

She went back to Zip's unconscious form. Already, a bruise had appeared where her pommel had struck him. She knelt and felt for a heartbeat, fearing she had hit too hard.

"Is he alive?"

She looked up at Walegrin. The garrison commander was smeared with blood, though apparently none of it was his own. He was a grisly sight. The color and smell of it had never bothered her before, but this time she turned her gaze away. It was then she saw her own hands. They, too, were dyed the same mortal shade.

"He lives," she answered at last. "I meant for him to live." A light breeze stirred Zip's black curls. Unconscious, there was almost an innocence about his features, so composed, peaceful. "He should stand public trial for his crimes," she said, disturbed to the core of her soul. "People must know that the PFLS's long night of terror has come to an end. Then we can start putting the pieces of this town back together."

A lamb, she thought of Zip suddenly. The sacrificial offer ing that will make us well and whole again. She took one of his still hands in hers, then pulled away. For the second time that night she tasted fear. Zip had fallen on his sword. There was a long cut across his palm. It relieved her to find no more serious wound.

Literally now, his blood was on her hand.

She rose, trying to wipe her fingers clean on her armor. "Take him," she said to Walegrin, "and say this to Kadakithis and Shupansea"-she looked at Zip's quiet face as she spoke, almost as if her words were meant for him-"that Zip is my peace offering to them and to this city. I will feud with the Beysa no more, but it's they who must pull the factions of Sanctuary into one unified whole." She hesitated, swallowed, went on. "Say also that they cannot do this from behind the palace walls. It's time for them to come out into the midst of their people and lead as leaders should."

She looked away from Zip's face and surveyed the courtyard. The dead were being arranged in separate groups: those that could still be recognized, those that could not. The stench of scorched flesh permeated the air. Her gladiators worked beside the garrison soldiers. Even a few Beysibs who had not gone back to bed lent their hands.

"Otherwise," she said to Walegrin, "all this will have been for nothing." She left him then, and Leyn, who still had the key, let her out through the Gate of the Gods. When no one could see her, the tears at last spilled down her cheeks, and hating the tears, she began to run. She didn't know the streets she took, nor did she know the time that passed before her grief and anger subsided. She wound up on the wharf again where she had been the night before, sitting, dangling her feet over the deep water as Sabellia began her journey through the sky.

She could still feel Zip's eyes upon her back, watching her as he had last evening.

She shuddered and hugged herself and wished for Reyk to keep her company. But the falcon was in his cage, and she was alone.

Alone.

As alone as Tempus Thales?

C. J. Cherryh

Haught opened the sealed window ever so carefully, in this nightbound room of shrouded furniture, the hulking, concealed chairs and table like so many pale ghosts reverted only then to furniture, pretending in the shadows. He made no sound. He made no trial of the wards which sealed the place, nor even of the vented shutters which closed the outside. But a wind breached those barriers effortlessly. The first breath of outside that had come into the mansion in... very long, stirred the draperies and the sheets and brought a sultry warmth to the dank, sealed staleness in which he had lived.

That wind stirred the few grains of dust that were about. (It was an astonishingly clean house, for one sealed so long, from which servants had long since fled.) It swept down the halls and into another room, and touched at the face of a man who slept... likewise very long. In that darkness, in that silence in which the mere arrival of a breeze was remarkable, that cold and handsome face lost its corpselike rigor; the nostrils widened. The eyes opened, long lashed, mere slits. The chest heaved with a wider breath. But Haught knew none of these things. He was drawn. He felt the exercise of magics like a tremor in the foundations, a quivering in his bones. He felt the power coming from that ruin across the street, where most of an entire block of Sanctuary's finest houses had mingled all in one charcoaled wreckage of tumbled brick and stone and timbers; and he felt it rush elsewhere, tantalizing and horrific and soul-threatening. He bent down to peer through the vents of that window, careful to shroud himself, which was his chiefest Talent, to go invisible to mages and other Talents. To that, his magic had descended. He spied on the working of magic that he could not presently command. He longed after power and he longed after his freedom, neither one of which he dared try to take.

He saw the coming together of his enemies out there in the dark, saw looks directed toward the house, and felt the straining of spells which the witch Ischade had woven about his prison. He shivered, as he stood there and inhaled that wind redolent of old burning and present sorceries and exorcisms, of revenge; he suddenly knew this house the target of all these preparations, and he felt an overwhelming terror: and trembled with his hatred. He felt the power build, and the wards flare with a moment's dissolutionAnd he was paralyzed, frozen with doubt of himself, even while that dreadful force came all about the house and burst the wards in a great flare of light. He screamed.

Elsewhere the sleeper started upright, and convulsed, and smoked from head to foot, which smoke streamed in a flash toward the hall, and the chimney, and aloft, in a moment that all living flesh in the house was battered with light and sound and pain.

The sleeper fell back again, slack-limbed; Haught collapsed by the window in the front room, and by the time he was conscious enough to lift himself on his arms and assess the damage, all the air seemed still and numb, his hearing blasted by a sound which never might have been sound at all.

He gathered himself up and clung to the sill, and lifted himself further, trembling. He stood there in that condition till it was all quiet again, stood there till the shadowed figures went their way from the ruin across the street, and he dared finally move the window and shut it again.

A hand descended on his shoulder and he whirled and let out a scream that made it very fortunate that the party across the street had dispersed. The calm, handsome face that stared so closely into his-smiled. It was not the smile of the man who had owned the body. It was not that of the witch who lived there now. Nothing sane was at home within that shell. Haught was a mage, still. Against another threat he might fling out some power, even with the crippling of magic throughout the town; he was still formidable.

But what slept behind those eyes, what wandered there sometimes sane and sometimes not, and sometimes one mind and sometimes another... was death. It had reasons, if it remembered them, to take a slow revenge; and to hurl magic against the wards (he felt them restored) which held that soul inHaught prayed to his distant gods and cringed against the shutters, made an unwanted rattle and flinched again. Ischade had been there. Ischade had been near enough long enough that perhaps this thing that looked like Tasfalen would pick that up; and remember its intentions again in some rage to blast wards and souls at once.

But the revenant merely lifted a hand and touched his face, lover's gesture.

"Dust," it said, which was its only word; daily Haught swept up the dust which infiltrated the house, and sifted it for the dust of magics which might linger in it, the remnant of the Globe of Power; with that dust he made a potion, and dutifully he infused it into this creature, stealing only a little for himself. He was faithful in this. He feared not to be. He feared a great deal in these long months, did Haught, once and for a few not-forgotten moments, the master mage of Sanctuary; he suspected consequences which paralyzed him in doubt. Because he had choices he dared none of them: his fear went that deep. It was his particular hell. "It's all right," he said now. "Go back to bed. Go to sleep." As if he spoke to some child.

"Pretty," it said. But it was not a child's voice, or a child's touch. It had found a new word. He shuddered and sought a way quietly to leave, to slip aside till it should sleep again. It had him trapped. "Pretty." The voice was clear, as if some deeper timbre had been there and now was lost. As if part of the madness had dispersed. But not all.