The Dead of Winter- - Thieves World 07 (22 page)

He said nothing, but stared at her in that dim lost way.

"No ambition?" Ischade asked. "I think you have-more ambition than I. You belong in the sun; and I can't bear that kind of light-Oh, not factually-" She laid a finger on his lips. He was always quick with his questions on that score, always mistook her. "It's questions I can't bear. It's notice. I find my associates in the dark places: the unmissable; the directly violent. I scour the streets. But you belong in the sunlight. You were made for leading men. Listen to me and think of this-are you a greater fool than Kadakithis?"

"Not fool enough to be Kadakithis."

"A man could take this town and make it the wall behind which Ranke could survive. Kadakithis will lose you your Empire and you could save it. Don't you understand this? Ranke is in retreat already. Forces are gathering here in Sanctuary, in the last stronghold Ranke has. And this wispy-minded prince of yours will lie abed with his snake-queen till the venom corrodes the rest of his wits: Do you not see this? Do you see only chance in this Beysib invasion?" He blinked again, blinked twice. "What are you talking about?"

"Do you believe all the Beysib have told about their coming here? What monstrous coincidence-their arrival here among us just as Nisibis exerts pressure from the north and Ranke begins to totter. I don't believe in coincidence. I don't trust coincidence where wizards are concerned. Kadakithis in his folly has let a foreign fleet in among us at our south door ... while Roxane from the north pours foreign gold into the hands of Ilsigi death squads and promises the fools self-rule. Self-rule! Listen to me. I can take care of Roxane. But I can't come into the daylight. You can. You're a man who understands hard choices. A better man than any in Sanctuary right now, a far better man than Kadakithis-"

"I have my duty-"

"To what? To the Stepsons? Lead them."

"We have a leader. I have a partner-"

"Critias. He follows Tempus. And Tempus-Do you understand him, half? He could take a world. One of his men could take a city, shore up an empire. You, Straton. And hand it to him. Tempus has a chance here-but you're the one that can take it for him; you're the only one who's in position. Ranke has a chance. Behind Sanctuary's walls. What if Tempus is coming? He might well be too late. What good anything if they come too late? Listen to me. Listen to what I have to tell you and test whether my advice is good."

"You," Janni said, and Stilcho, his back to the black air and the river, felt a tenuous grip on both his arms, gazed into a face all but solid, and Janni's best aspect-Janni as he had been-before. Before Roxane. "You're the only one I can go to. The only one I can reach. I've been through the town-" Gods knew what that compassed, the nightbound wandering down the winds: Stilcho guessed. "Stilcho, before the gods, we've got precious little left. The dead of this pesthole patrol her streets; they watch her bridges. Half of them are Roxane's. Some of them-some of them aren't anyone's. Man, you are still a man, they left you that much-are you that afraid of Ischade? Is it that? You slip her cord and she-takes away whatever she gave you? Is that what you march to now, man? You took an oath. You meant it once. You kept it and those dogs fouled it; and I'm asking now, I'm asking you get my partner out of this. He's necessary, don't you see that? He's-what he is. And they'll use him. Roxane's wrung the sense out of him and the priests will get the rest-"

"You're the worst kind of ghost, Janni. The worst kind. The walking kind. You won't go back. Will you? Not till someone settles you."

"No," Janni said, and the tendrils of something very cold wove their way around Stilcho, between him and his body. Stilcho opened his mouth to cry out; but he had made the mistake, he had let Janni into his mind. And the spot that was Janni got wider. His dead-alive heart lurched against his ribs as the river-wind skirled up at him. "No," Janni said. "You want to know the difference in what you are and what I was? / was better than you. I was stronger. I still am. You want me to show you, Stilcho?"

Stilcho's legs trembled. His left foot scraped backward, against Stilcho's every effort to stand firm on the brink.

"A step-a small step, Stilcho," Janni said. "I'll only grow stronger. If the witch does send me back I'll be in hell every time she sends you down after souls-and some night you won't come out of hell, Stilcho-lad. And not all your dead dog-lovers will save you. Or you listen to me now, you get him out-"

"Bluff."

The foot dragged backward, knees shook beneath him. "Try me. How much have I got to lose?"

"Stop-stop it."

The foot stayed. A feeling of oily cold settled into Stilcho's gut. "There are advantages to being wholly dead. But few." Janni's voice faded. "I see the dead walking patrol in hell and in the streets. No way out. I see the past and the future and I can't sort them out-I see Niko-I see two ways from here-and I can't sort them out. Two ways for Ranke-for the corps-for him-Niko's got to be free, no priest's pawn-free-Has to be-the god-the god-"

"Shut up!"

The feeling went, just-went. Stilcho stood shivering and leaned on the fence, staring out over the gulf. He had no illusions that the ghost was gone. It was revenge-bound and bound to the living and bound to hang about. In truth he had nothing left of loyalty himself-not to comrades, not to anything so much as the thin thread that each time hauled him up out of hell when Ischade sent him down.

That thin thread grew strongest when he looked closest into her eyes, when he shared her bed and each morning died for it and came back from hell again, because the thread was always there. It was all he had of pleasure. It was all he had of life. He knew what hell was, being too frequently a visitor; and when he went down again the souls of his dead would cling to him and clamor at him and beg him for rescue-and he would strike at them and leave them in the dark, clawing his own way to the light like a drowning man, back to the next breath that he could win in the world and back to the bed of the woman who killed them. So much for loyalties. This constant passage back and forth left him no illusions such as Janni had-of ties to anything. There was only fear. And sometime pleasure. But more of fear.

Ischade-had a new amusement. Ischade had herself a man she had not yet killed; one useful to her in this world, and Stilcho was starkly terrified that when Strat died-she might find Strat still useful, in place of a scarred and maimed husk that had never been the man Straton had been.

Stilcho was, at the depth of his attentuated life-terrified; and Janni had put the name to it.

Brush moved, ever so quietly. It might have been the wind. But a touch brushed his arm, a touch where no sound had been; and Stilcho gasped and spun, and all but took that fatal fall-except for the hand that closed on his arm and kept him from headlong flight.

"Does the river draw you?" Haught asked. "The place ef one's death-has a hold on a soul. I'd avoid the water, Stilcho."

Straton's eyes glazed, the pupils slid aside in slitted lids, as he lost awareness for the dreams he dreamed, that were a drug more potent than any apothecary's.

And Ischade shivered, letting the spell wind and build till the candles fluttered-she was lost a moment, self-indulgence. But only a moment. She bent and whispered more things in Strat's ear and he stirred and gazed up at her with pupils wide and black and drinking down all she might give him.

"There are actions you have to take," she whispered, "for Ranke's sake, for Crit's-for Tempus. I'll tell them to you, to save this city, save the Empire, save what you've always fought for. You stand in the light, Strat, Ace, in the clean sunlight-and never look into the dark; never try to see the shadows. They're far too dark for you-"

"Who was here just now?" Haught asked; and Stilcho twisted away, wishing to go back from the river-edge. But the ex-slave, Ischade's Nisi apprentice-had more strength in his fine hands than seemed likely.

"Janni," Stilcho said. "It was Janni."

"That wants fixing," Haught said.

Time was that Stilcho would have spat on the man; when he was alive and Haught was no more than a slave. But Haught served Her now. And Haught had talent that Her talent fed; and the stripping of a soul from a body was likely a negligible thing for Haught these days. Stilcho felt the chill that came when Haught's substance passed between him and Ischade. "Don't-I tried to reason with him. I tried to tell him he's dead. He's not listening. His partner's in trouble."

"I know," Haught said. His hand was viselike on Stilcho's cloaked arm, numbing.

"And you very much don't want to go after him, do you. Stepson?"

"He's-crazy."

Haught's eyes met his, deceptively gentle, woman-gentle. The fingers loosened.

"Difficult times, Stepson. She has company and you wander the dark." The fingers wandered gently down his arm and took his bare hand. "You have such simple loyalties now. Like life. Like those who can hold you to it. Ask me-how you can help me?"

"How can I help you?" The words poured out without a thought of resistance. The same way they did for Ischade. It was only afterward that the shame got to him. After-ward when he had time to think; but that was not now, with Haught this close, death gaping and lapping below the drop from the garden fence.

"You can go to hell," Haught said.

It was not a curse. It was an order. "For her-" Stilcho said, lips stammering.

"I go for her, that's all."

"Oh, it's in her service. Believe me."

2

Strat blinked in the sunlight and rode past the Blue line checkpoint in the morning-the bay's shod hooves ringing hollow on the cobbles beside the bridge. The misnamed White Foal flowed murkily by, with its scarce traffic on dark-brown water; a skiff or two; a scruffy little barge.

The scarred end-posts stood innocent in the sun. The reeking, rotten streets of Downwind on the other side lost their mystery by daylight and became the ugly thing they were. The poor shuffled about their eternal business of staying alive, whatever the business of the night. It was a peaceful day in Sanctuary and the other-side. The invisible lines still existed; but they weakened by day, descending to amiable formality, expecting no assault. The iron discipline of the gangs and the death squads gave way to pragmatic spot-searches, Ilsigi poor taking their little chances with the lines they could cross, beggars begging their usual territories. Death squads operated nightly; bodies turned up by daylight to impress the populace.

But a Stepson still rode through, down the invisible no-man's line of the riverside. Strat saw the blue graffiti on one wall; saw red on another, where rival gangs blazoned their claims at riverside.

He knew hate surrounded him. He felt it in the city, felt it when he rode up the daylit streets in Jubal's territory-toward the Black line where members of the Band and the 3rd Commando held their own, keeping the bridge and one long street open from the Stepson Yellow line in the west, through Red through Blue and into the Black of the Mageguild's territory, commerce maintained against every attempt of the individual militias and factions to shut it down. It was a demonstration Ranke was not yet done; and some wanted to demonstrate otherwise. His eyes scanned the way that he rode, his skin absorbed the temperature of the glances that fell on him.

The mongrel crowds of Sanctuary were out by daylight. The workmen and the merchants-the few shops, graffiti scarred, marked with the Permissions of Jubal's gangs that ruled the sector-spread few goods. Merchants had few goods. Took few chances. Many doors stayed shut; shop-shutters were boarded over. Uptown did not see this danger-signal; there the shops hired more guards; there the rich doubled the locks on their doors. Walegrin of the Garrison knew: the meres the prince hired knew, and both prepared as best they could-to hold the other long street open, hill to harbor.

Straton lifted his eyes, blinking in the day. He let the horse carry him in that lassitude his mornings-after had; let his mind carry him in crazed thoughts that darted this way and that, through the streets, to the detail of a graffiti'd wall that informed him of some death squad active in the night-to the beggar on the curb that withdrew from his horse's skittish hooves. A cart of empty jars passed him. A handbarrow groaned past under a load of rags and junk. A sewer opening afflicted his nostrils with its sweet-ugly stench. And a blue sky shone down on Ranke's slow death.

He blinked again, looked uptown through the haze of morning-smokes from Sanctuary's thousand fires, up the winding of one of the long streets. And it seemed there was a line drawn in the world, with fools on one side and the other of it, and himself one of the few who could see himself as a fool. The high shining fine houses where Ranke frittered away its last hours barriered themselves in vain against the tide that was about to come uptown. Walegrin could not hold forever. Neither could they, below.

Sanctuary, with its backside to the sea.

With its mongrel gods and its mongrel merchants and the last lost rim of secure land in the Empire. Nisibis would sweep down to the shores; and the Beysib up from the south like a rolling wave; and for an intelligent man who had soldiered all his life away for the fools who wore the gold and the purple-there was in the end, riot and murder and death by stoning in city streets. Fool, he thought, hating Kadakithis for what he was not. And had a vision of dark eyes and felt the feathery touch of soft lips and the dizzying descent into dark.

He took up on the reins. Looked uphill with thoughts moiling in him: And snapped the reins and sent the bay clattering along the Maze, through increasingly tangled streets. Red PFLS graffiti sprawled across a wall, once, twice, obscuring the usual obscenity, Jubal's blue hawk splashed over that. The bay spumed broken pottery, sent a girl shrieking for the curb. A rock pelted back and rebounded off the cobbles. The young were always the rebels. The uptown house echoed to soft steps and the closing of doors and Moria came downstairs, wrapped in her robe. She cursed the servants, let out a gutter oath, and stopped dead on the steps, staring wide-eyed at what had gotten in. She clutched the robe about her, wiped at a frowsy tangle of hair and blinked in the dim light. Ex-thief, ex-hawkmask, she knew the elegant shape standing in the polished foyer by the Caronnese vase: the elegant, cloaked man who looked up at her and smiled.