Shadows of Sanctuary978-0441806010 (29 page)

'What are you doing here, Sissy? Where is your lord, Kada-kithis?' Tempus stopped his horse well back from the irascible pair of blacks in their traces. This eunuch was near their colour: a Wriggly. Cut young and deftly, his answer came in a sweet alto: 'Lord Marshal, most daunting of Hell Hounds, I bring you His Majesty's apologies, and true word, if you will heed it.'

The eunuch, no more than seventeen, gazed at him longingly. Kadakithis had accepted this fancy toy from Jubal, the slaver, despite the slavemaster's own brand on its high rump, and the deeper dangers implied by the identity of its fashioner. Tempus had marked it, when first he heard its lilting voice in the palace, for he had heard that voice before. Foolish, haughty, or merely pressed beyond a bedwarmer's ability to cope: no matter; this creature ofJubal's, he had long wanted. Jubal and Tempus had been making private war, the more fierce for being undeclared, since Tempus had first come to Sanctuary and seen the swaggering, masked killers Jubal kept on staff terrorizing whom they chose on the town's west side. Tempus had made those masked murderers his private game stock, the west end of Sanctuary his personal preserve, and the campaign was on. Time and again, he had dispatched them. But tactics change, and Jubal's had become too treacherous for Tempus to endure, especially now with the northern insurrection half out of its egg of rumour. He said to the parted lips awaiting his permission to speak and to the deer-soft eyes doting on his every move that the eunuch might dismount the car, prostrate itself before him, and from there deliver its message.

It did all of those, quivering with delight like a dog enraptured by the smallest attention, and said with its forehead to the sand: 'My lord, the Prince bids me say he has been detained by Certain Persons, and will be late, but means to attend you. If you were to ask me why that was, then I would have no choice but to admit to you that the three most mighty magicians, those whose names cannot be spoken, came down upon the summer palace in billows of blackest smoke and foul odours, and that the fountains ran red and the sculptures wept and cried, and frogs jumped upon my lord in his bath, all because the Hazards are afraid that you might move to free the slayer-of sorcerers called Cime before she comes to trial. Although my master assured them that you would not, that you had said nothing to him about this woman, when I left they still were not satisfied, but were shaking walls and raising shades and doing all manner ofwizardly things to demonstrate their concern.'

The eunuch fell quiet, awaiting leave to rise. For an instant there was total silence, then the sound of Tempus's slithering dismount. Then he said: 'Let us see your brand, pretty one,' and with a wiggling of its upthrust rump the eunuch hastened to obey,

It took Tempus longer than he had estimated to wrest a confession from the Wriggly, from the Ilsig who was the last of his line and at the end of his line. It did not make cries of pleasure or betrayal or agony, but accepted its destiny as good Wrigglies always did, writhing soundlessly. - '

When he let it go, though the blood was running down its legs and it saw the intestine like wet parchment caught in his fingernails, it wept with relief, promising to deliver his exhortation posthaste to Kadakithis. It kissed his hand, pressing his palm against its beardless cheek, never realizing that it was, itself, his message, or that it would be dead before the sun set. 2

Kneeling to wash his arm in the surf, he found himself singing a best-forgotten funerary dirge in the ancient argot all mercenaries leam. But his voice was gravelly and his memories were treacherous thickets full of barbs, and he stopped as soon as he realized that he sang. The eunuch would die because he remembered its voice from the workshop of despicable Kurd, the frail and filthy vivisectionist, while he had been an experimental animal therein. He remembered other things, too: he remembered the sear of the branding iron and the smell of flesh burning and the voices of two fellow guardsmen, the Hell Hounds Zaibar and Razkuli, piercing the drug-mist through holes the pain poked in his stupor. And he recalled a protracted and hurtful healing, shut away from any who might be overawed to see a man regrow a limb. Mending, he had brooded, seeking certainty, some redress fit to his grievance. But he had not been sure enough to act. Now, after hearing the eunuch's tale, he was certain. When Tempus was certain. Destiny got out its ledger.

But what to write therein? His instinct told him it was Black Jubal he wanted, not the two Hell Hounds; that Razkuli was a nonentity and Zaibar, like a raw horse, was merely in need of schooling. Those two had single-handedly arranged for Tempus's snuff to be drugged, for him to be branded, his tongue cut out, then sold off to wicked little Kurd, there to languish interminably under the knife? He could not credit it. Yet the eunuch had said - and in such straits no one lies - that though Jubal had gone to Zaibar for help in dealing with Tempus, the slave trader had known nothing of what fate the Hell Hounds had in mind for their colleague. Never mind it; Jubal's crimes were voluminous. Tempus would take him for espionage - that punishment could only be administered once. Then personal grudges must be put aside: it is unseemly to hold feuds with the dead. But if not Jubal, then who had written Tempus's itinerary for Hell? It sounded, suspiciously, like the god's work. Since he had turned his back upon the god, things had gone from bad to worse.

And if Vashanka had not turned His face away from Tempus even while he lay helpless, the god had not stirred to rescue him (though any limb lopped off him still grew back, any wound he took healed relatively quickly, as men judge such things). No, Vashanka, his tutelary, had not hastened to aid him. The speed of Tempus's healing was always in direct proportion to the pleasure the god was taking in His servant. Vashanka's terrible rebuke had made the man wax terrible, also. Curses and unholy insults rang down from the mind of the god and up from the mind of the man who then had no tongue left with which to scream. It had taken Hanse the thief, young Shadowspawn, chancemet and hardly known, to extricate him from interminable torture. Now he owed more debt than he liked to Shadowspawn, and Shadowspawn knew more about Tempus than even that backstreeter could want to know, so that the thief's eyes slid away, sick and mistrustful, when Tempus would chance upon him in the Maze.

But even then, Tempus's break with divinity was not complete. Hopefully, he stood as Vashanka in the recreation of the Ten-Slaying and Seduction of Azyuna, thinking to propitiate the god while saving face - to no avail. Soon after, hearing that his sister, Cime, had been apprehended slaying sorcerers wantonly in their beds, he had thrown the amulet of Vashanka, which he had worn since former times, out to sea from this very shore - he had had no choice. Only so much can be borne from men, so much from gods. Zaibar, had he the wit, would have revelled in Tempus's barely hidden reaction to his news that the fearsome mage-killer was now in custody, her diamond rods locked away in the Hall of Judgement awaiting her disposition.

He growled to himself, thinking about her, her black hair winged with grey, in Sanctuary's unsegregated dungeons where any syphilitic rapist could have her at will, while he must not touch her at all, or raise hand to help her lest he start forces in motion he could not control. His break with the god stemmed from her presence in Sanctuary, as his endless wandering as Vashanka's minion had stemmed from an altercation he had over her with a mage. If he went down into the pits and took her, the god would be placated; he had no desire to reopen relations with Vashanka, who had turned His face away from His servant. If Tempus brought her out under his own aegis, he would have the entire Mageguild at his throat; he wanted no quarrel with the Adepts. He had told her not to slay them here, where he must maintain order and the letter of the law.

By the time Kadakithis arrived in that very same chariot, its braces sticky with Wriggly blood, Tempus was in a humour darker than the drying clots, fully as dark as the odd, round cloud coming fast from the northeast. Kadakithis's noble Rankan visage was suffused with rage, so that his skin was darker than his pale hair: 'But whyt In the name of all the gods, what did the poor little creature ever do to you? You owe me a eunuch, and an explanation.'

He tapped his lacquered nails on the chariot's bronze rim.

'I have a perfect replacement in mind,' smiled Tempus smoothly, 'my lord. As for why... all eunuchs are duplicitous. This one was an information conduit to Jubal. Unless you would like to invite the slaver to policy sessions and let him stand behind those ivory screens where your favourites eavesdrop as they choose, I have acted well within my prerogatives as marshal. If my name is attached to your palace security, then your palace will be secure.'

'Bastard! How dare you even imply that / should apologize to you! When will you treat me with the proper amount of respect? You tell me all eunuchs are treacherous, the very breath after offering me another one!'

'I am giving you respect. Reverence I reserve for better men than I. When you have attained that dignity, we shall both know it: you will not have to ask. Until then, either trust or discharge me.' He waited, to see if the prince would speak. Then he continued: 'As to the eunuch I offer as replacement, I want you to arrange for his training. You like Jubal's work; send to him saying yours has met with an accident and you wish to tender another into his care to be similarly instructed. Tell him you paid a lot of money for it, and you have high hopes.'

'You have such a eunuch?'

'I will have it.'

'And you expect me to conscion your sending of an agent in there - aye, to aid you - without knowing your plan, or even the specifics of the Wriggly's confession?'

'Should you know, my lord, you would have to approve, or disapprove. As it lies, you are free of onus.'

The two men regarded each other, checked hostility jumping between them like Vashanka's own lightning in the long, dangerous pause. Kadakithis flicked his purple mantle over his shoulder. He squinted past Tempus, into the waning day. 'What kind of cloud is that?'

Tempus swung around in his saddle, then back. 'That should be our friend from Ranke.'

The prince nodded. 'Before he arrives, then, let us discuss the matter of the female prisoner Cime.'

Tempus's horse snorted and threw its head, dancing in place. 'There is nothing to discuss.'

'But... ? Why did you not come to me about it? I could have done something, previously. Now, I cannot...'

'I did not ask you. I am not asking you.' His voice was a blade on whetstone, so that Kadakithis pulled himself up straight. 'It is not for me to take a hand.'

'Your own sister? You will not intervene?'

'Believe what you will, prince. I will not sift through gossip with any man, be he prince or king.'

The prince lost hold, then, having been 'princed' too often back in Ranke, and berated the Hell Hound.

The man sat quite still upon the horse the prince had given him, garbed only in his loinguard though the day was fading, letting his gaze full of festering shadows rest in the prince's until Kadakithis trailed off, saying, '... the trouble with you is that anything they say about you could be true, so a man knows not what to believe.'

'Believe in accordance with your heart,' the voice like grinding Stone suggested, while the dark cloud came to hover over the beach. It settled, seemingly, into the sand, and the horses shied back, necks outstretched, nostrils huge. Tempus had his sorrel up alongside the chariot team and was leaning down to take the lead-horse's bridle when an earsplitting clarion came from the cloud's translucent centre. The Hell Hound raised his head then, and Kadakithis saw him shiver, saw his brow arch, saw a flicker of deepset eyes within their caves of bone and lid. Then again Tempus spoke to the chariot horses, who swivelled their ears towards him and took his counsel, and he let loose the lead-horse's bridle and spurred his own between Kadakithis's chariot and what came out of the cinereous cloud which had been so long descending upon them in opposition to the prevailing wind. The man on the horse who could be seen within the cloud waved: a flash of scarlet glove, a swirl of burgundy cloak. Behind his tasselled steed he led another, and it was this second grey horse who again challenged the other stallions on the beach, its eyes full of fire. Farther back within the cloud, stonework could be seen, masonry like none in Sanctuary, a sky more blue and hills more virile than any Kadakithis knew.

The first horse, reins flapping, was emerging, nose and neck casting shadows upon solid Sanctuary sand; then its hooves scattered grains, and the whole of the beast, and its rider, and the second horse he led on a long tether, stood corporeal and motionless before the Hell Hound, while behind, the cloud whirled in upon itself and was gone with an audible 'pop'.

'Greetings, Riddler,' said the rider in burgundy and scarlet, as he doffed his helmet with its blood-dark crest to Tempus. 'I did not expect you, Abarsis. What could be so urgent?'

'I heard about the Tros horse's death, so I thought to bring you another, better auspiced, I hope. Since I was coming anyway, our friends suggested I bring what you require. I have long wanted to meet you.'

Spurring his mount forward, he held out his hand. Red stallion and iron grey snaked arched necks, thrusting forth clacking teeth, wide-gaped jaws emitting squeals to go with flattened ears and rolling eyes. Above horse hostilities could be heard snatches of low wordplay, parry and riposte: '... disappointed that you could not build the temple'.'... welcome to take my place here and try. The foundations of the temple grounds are defiled, the priest in charge more corrupt than even politics warrants. I wash my hands ...''... with the warring imminent, how can you ... ?'