The Dead of Winter- - Thieves World 07 (27 page)

But they were ineffectual finally against a torn, bloody thing that haunted the halls and that tried the partnership that had been between them. He knew what had come streaking in to find him; he knew what faithful, vengeful wraith had held the line again. It pleaded with him in his dreams, forgetting that it was dead. He wept at such times, because he could not explain to it and it was not interested in listening.

"Get me out of here," he yelled down the hall, startling the children. A priest showed up in the hallway, spear in hand, eyes wide. "Dammit, get me out of this city!"

The priest kept staring. Niko kicked the door shut and sank down against it, child in either arm.

They crawled into his lap, hugged him round the neck. One wiped his face, and he stared past, longing for the dawn and the boat they promised would come. A barge went down the White Foal, an uncommonly sturdy one by Sanctuary standards. Ischade watched it, arms about her, the hood of her black cloak back. Her faithful were there: chastened Haught, smug Stilcho. The usual birds sat in the tree. Breath frosted on the wind-a cold morning, but that hardly stopped the looting and the sniping. There was a smoky taint to the air.

"They want war," Ischade said, "let them have war. Let them have it till they're full of it. Till this town's so confounded no force can hold it. Have you heard the fable of Shipri's ring? The goddess was set on by three demons who plainly had rape in mind; she had a golden armlet, and she flung it to the first if he would fight off the other two and let her go. But the second snatched at it and so did the third; the goddess walked away and there they stand to this day. No one devil can get it; and the other two won't let go till the world ends." She turned a dazzling smile on them both, in a merry humor quite unlike herself. The barge passed beneath the White Foal bridge. A black bird flew after it, sending forlorn cries down the wind.

The bay horse was dead. Strat limped when he walked, and persisted in walking, pacing the floor in the temporary headquarters the Band had set up deep within the mage quarter. A clutter of maps lay on the table. Plans that the ever changing character of the streets changed hourly. He wanted sleep. He wanted a bath. He reeked of smoke and sweat and blood, and he gave orders and drew lines and listened to the reports that began to come in.

He had not wanted this. He had no wish to be in command. He was, somehow. Somehow it had fallen on him. The Band fought phantoms, confounded them with the living and mage-illusions. Sync was missing. Lyncaeos was dead. Kama had not been heard from. The bay horse had damn near broken his leg when an arrow found it. He had had to kill it. Stepsons and commandos killed with terrible efficiency and the Ilsigi guerrillas who thought they knew what side they were on and thought they knew all about war might see things differently this morning. And change alliances again. In a situation like this alliances might change twice in a morning.

And Kadakithis sat in his palace and the Guard and the mercs held it. Strat limped to the window and entertained treasonous thoughts, hating thoughts, staring up toward the palace through the pall of smoke.

Diane Duane

... But who could ever tell of all the daring

in the stubborn hearts of women, the hard will,

how the female force crams its resisted way

through night, through death, taking no "no" for answer?

Yet still Right's anvil stands staunch on the ground, and there smith Destiny hammers out the sword.

Should that force, that fierce gift, be used for ill, delayed in glory, pensive through the murk,

Vengeance comes home. Yet odd the way of life,

for if the power's used for good, then still

She comes; though in far other form, and strange ...

In Sanctuary that day the smoke rose up to heaven, a sooty sideways-blowing banner against the blue of early winter. Some of that smoke rose up from altars to attract the attention of one god or another, and failed. Most of the immortals were too busy looking on in horror or delight or divine remoteness as their votaries went to war against one another, tearing the town into pieces and setting the pieces afire. A god or two even left town. Many non-gods tried to: some few succeeded. Of those who remained, many non-immortals died, slaughtered in the riots or burned in the firestorms that swept through the city. No one tried or bothered to count them all, not even the gods. One died in Sanctuary that day who was not mortal (quite), and not a god (quite). His death was unusual in that it was noticed-not just once but three times.

He noticed it himself, of course. Harran had worked close to death much of his life, both as apprentice healer-priest of Siveni Gray-Eyes and as the barber and leech to the ersatz Stepsons. He knew the inevitable results of the kind of swordcut that the great dark shape a-horseback swung at him. No hope, he thought clinically, while he ducked staggering away with a boy's weight slung over his shoulder. That's an expert handling that sword, that is. Past that mere thought, and a flash of pained concern for the arrow-shot boy he'd been trying to save, there was no time for anything but confusion.

The confusion had been a fixture in his mind lately. For one thing, the real Stepsons had come back, and Harran was not finding their return as funny as he'd once thought he would. He hadn't reckoned on being counted a traitor for supporting the false Stepsons in the true ones' absence. But he also hadn't reckoned on having so much trouble with his lost goddess Siveni when he summoned her up. Her manifestation, and her attempt to level Sanctuary-foiled by the clubfooted beggar-girl he'd been using as idiot labor and "mattress"-had left him confused to a standstill. Now Mriga the idiot was Mriga the goddess, made so by the same spell that had brought Siveni into the streets of Sanctuary. And, involved in the spell himself, Harran had briefly become a god too. But his short bout of divinity had made the world no plainer to him. Suddenly bereft of Mriga, who had taken Siveni and gone wherever gods go-stricken by the loss of a hand during the spell, and by its abrupt replacement (with one of Mriga's)-Harran had retreated to the fake Stepsons' barracks. He had taken to wearing gloves and drinking a great deal while he tried to think out what to do next with his life. Somehow he never seemed to get much thinking done. And then the real Stepsons stormed their old barracks, slaughtering in Vashanka's name the "traitors" who had impersonated them with such partial success. They were evidently particularly enraged about dogs being kept in the barracks. Harran didn't understand it. What was Vashanka's problem with dogs?

Had one bit Him once? In any case, when Harran fled to a Maze-side garret to escape the sack of the barracks, he made sure to take little brown Tyr with him. She was yipping and howling unseen behind him now, as that sword descended, and there was nothing he could do. It hit him hard in the temple, and there was surprisingly little pain. He was faintly horrified to feel the top of his head crumple and slide sideways; and out of the corner of his left eye he saw half his skull and its contents come away clean on the edge of the sword. Harran fell-he knew he fell, from feeling his face and chest smash into the bloody dirt-but his vision, until it darkened, was frozen on that sidewise look. He became bemused; brains were usually darker. Evidently the typical color of the other ones he had examined was due to clotting of blood in the tissues. His had not yet had time, that was all. The next time he ... the next time ... but this was wrong. Where was Siveni? Where was Mriga? They always said that when ... you died, your god or goddess ... met you....

... and night descended upon Harran, and his spirit fled far away. Tyr didn't know she was a dog. She didn't know anything in the way people do. Her consciousness was all adjectives, hardly any nouns-affect without association. Things happened, but she didn't think of them that way; she hardly thought at all. She just was.

There was also something else. Not a person-Tyr had no idea what persons were but a presence, with which the world was as it should be, and without which her surroundings ceased to be a world. A human looking through Tyr's mind would have perceived such a place as hell-all certainties gone, all loves abolished, nothing left but an emotional void through which one fell sickeningly, forever. It had been that way long ago. In Tyr's vague way she dreaded that hell's return. But since the Presence came into the world, knitting everything together, hell had stayed far away.

There were also familiar shapes that moved about in her life. One was thin and gangly with a lot of curly straggly fur on top, and shared one or another of Tyr's sleeping spots with her. The other was a tall, blond-bearded shape that had been with her longer and had acquired more importance. Tyr dimly understood that the presence of this second shape had something to do with her well-being or lack of it, but she wasn't capable of working out just what, or of caring that she couldn't. When the tall shape held her, when in its presence food manifested itself, or sticks flew and she ran and brought them back, Tyr was ecstatically happy. Even when the skinny shape subtracted itself from her universe, she wasn't upset for long. Both the Presence and the tall shape, though surprised, seemed to approve; so it must have been all right. And the shape that counted hadn't gone away. It was when that shape was missing, or she smelled trouble about it, that Tyr's world went to pieces. It was in pieces now. It had been since the time she had been cheerfully rooting in the barracks' kitchen-midden, and suddenly a lot of horses came, and some of the buildings around got very bright. Tyr didn't identify as fire the light that sprang up among them, since fire as she understood it was something that stayed in a little stone place in the center of the world, and didn't bother you unless you got too close. So, unconcerned, she had gone on rooting in the midden until the tall thing came rushing to her and snatched her up. This annoyed Tyr; and she became more annoyed yet when her nose told her that there had begun to be meat lying all over. Tyr never got enough meat. But the tall one wouldn't let her at it. He took her to some dark place that wasn't the center of the world, and once there he wouldn't be still, and wouldn't hold her, and wouldn't let her out. This went on for some time. Tyr became distressed. The world was coming undone.

Then the tall one began to smell of fear-more so than usual. He ran out and left her, and the fraying of the world completed itself. Tyr cried out without knowing that she did, and danced and scrabbled at the hard thing that was sometimes a hole in the wall. But no matter what she did, it wouldn't be a hole. Then it occurred to her that there was another hole, up high. The tall one had been by it, and with some frantic thought of getting close to him by being where he had been, Tyr jumped up on things she did not know were tables and chairs, clambered her way onto the windowsill to perch there wobbling, and nosed the shutter aside.

She saw the tall shape lurching across the street, with something slung over its shoulder. Tyr's nose was full of the smell of burning and blood from below her. She added everything swiftly together-the tallness and the scorch and the meat down there-and realized that he was bringing her dinner after all. Wildly excited, she began to yip-Then horses came running at the tall one. Tyr's feelings about this were mixed. Horses kicked. But once one horse had stopped kicking, and the tall one had given her some, and it had been very good. More food? Tyr thought, as much as she ever thought anything. But the horses didn't stop when they got to the tall one and the meat. For a moment she couldn't see where the tall one was. Then the horses separated, and Tyr whimpered and sniffed the air. She caught the tall one's scent. But to her horror, the scent did something she had never smelled it do before: it cooled. It thinned, and vanished, and turned to meat. And the Presence, the something that made the world alive, the Presence went away....

When the universe is destroyed before one's eyes, one may well mourn. Tyr had no idea of what mourning was, but she did it. Standing and shaking there on the window-sill, anguished, she howled and howled. And when the horses got too close and the tall things on them pointed at her, she panicked altogether and fell out of the window, rolled bumping down the roof-gable and off it. The pain meant nothing to her: at the end of the world, who counts bruises? Tyr scrambled to her feet, in a pile of trash, limping, not noticing the limp. She fled down the dirty street, shied past the flaming barricade, ran past even the crushed meat that had been the tall thing. She ran, howling her terror and loss, for a long time. Eventually she found at least one familiar smell-a midden. Desperate for the familiar, she half buried herself in the garbage, but it was no relief. Footsore, too miserable even to nose through the promising bones and rinds she lay in, Tyr cowered and whimpered in restless anguish for hours. Finally weariness forced her, still crying, into a wretched sleep. Soon enough the sun would be up. But it would rise black, as far as Tyr was concerned. Joy was over forever. The tall thing was meat, and the Presence was gone. As sleep took her, Tyr came her closest ever to having a genuine thought. Moaning, she wished she were meat too.

Sanctuary's gods, like most others, resided by choice in the timelessness which both contains all mortal time and space, and lies within them. That timelessness is impossible to understand-even the patron gods of the sciences shake their heads at its physics-and difficult to describe, especially to mortals, whose descriptions necessarily involve time, in the telling if nowhere else. Light, overwhelming, is what most mortals remember who pass through those realms in dream or vision. The fortunate dead who come there, having given up time, see things differently. So do the gods. In that place where the absence of time makes space infinitely malleable, they rear their bright dwellings and demesnes with no tool but thought, and alter them at whim-changing, too, their own forms as mortals change clothes, for similar reasons: hygiene, courtesy, boredom, special occasions. Like mortals, too, they have their pet issues and favorite causes. There are collaborations and feuds, amours with mortals or other divinities, arguments between pantheons or within them. Some of the gods find this likeness to mortal behavior distressing. Most profess not to care, just as most profess to ignore the deeper light that often broods beyond and within the Bright Dwellings, watching what gods and mortals do.