The price of victory- - Thieves World 13 (10 page)

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He wasn't sure which he liked better, but he liked both alternatives dough to bare his teeth in a humorless smile as he waited.

, And waited. And waited. He stood. He sat. He paced. He leaned. He heard his horse nickering, then pawing the cobbles. He checked its tack, Stroked its nose. Strat's bay horse would have evoked the nicker he'd heard, but Crit didn't see the bay horse anywhere.

Just as well; the bay made him nervous. Made everybody nervous who

54 AFTERMATH

didn't like reincarnated horses with spots on their withers through which a man could glimpse hell itself if the light was right.

Because of the nicker, Crit realized he didn't want to see Strat right now. Not until he'd solved the problem of Kama and Torchholder. Not now, when the gray sky and the gray buildings and the gray dockside melded with the gray horse Tempus had left him, to take the sting out of deserting him.

The gray was a prize, one of the best from the Stepsons' stock farm up
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at Wizardwall. Worth more than a block of the Maze, contents included. Worth more than the whole town, to some men's way of thinking.

But Crit would have given it to Strat gladly if Strat would only re nounce the ghost-horse and the vampire woman who'd conjured it for him . - .

"Psst," said a voice from behind him and Crit refused to flinch, or jump, or betray the heart-stopping urgency within him that counseled a dive for cover, a drawn sword.

He turned slowly and said, "You're late, hawkmask."

"We aren't hawkmasks any longer," said an oddly accented voice from under a shadowing hooded cloak. "And I never was. We're just free lancing, we are. Just workin' for pay. You like meres, bein' you was one." A languorous, professional lilt in a northern-accented voice that never theless had a deadly, nervous edge to it.

Crit squinted into the gloom but the only thing he saw better for his trouble was the rigging of a small fishing boat bobbing behind the stranger, much farther down the quayside than the cloaked man.

Was it a masking spell, or a trick of the light that veiled this face in gloom? The fellow was out of reach, but just barely. And familiar, but so was half of Sanctuary. Someone he'd rousted long ago, Crit's mind said, and started spinning through the years, seeking to match a face to the
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voice he recognized.

Crit asked, to hear the voice again, "What do you want, honest work?

There isn't any, not here. Prefer my service to Jubal's? Is that what you're getting at?"

"Yours? You've got a service, now? That's how come the black man sent me to help you out?"

The hooded man's ^'s were sibilantly northern and the tension underly ing his words was full of satisfaction.

Somebody they'd done something to once, for sure. Somebody the Sacred Band hadn't treated with softest gloves. Somebody who was en joying this more than he ought, because he feared Crit and his kind more than he'd admit.

"Got a name, friend?" Crit said easily, shifting enough that he could

slide his hand onto his belt and his fingers toward his knife's hilt without being either too obvious or too surreptitious. It wasn't a threat so much as a punctuation mark.

The contact saw, and tossed his head. "Vis. Ring a bell. Commander?"

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Commander. Crit still couldn't get used to it, not in Sanctuary, not in this context, not with all its current connotations. Did Tempus still hold Crit's affair with Kama against him so venomously that he'd sentence him to years of hard labor here with violent death at the end of it?

For Crit remembered this "Vis" now, and what he recalled didn't put him at ease. Mradhon Vis, a northerner-Thief, malefactor, one-time part ner-in-crime of the Nisibisi mageling, Haught. And gods knew of whom or what else. They'd beaten information out of Vis more than once, when the Stepsons were fighting the Nisibisi witch here. Strat, the Stepsons'

chief interrogator, had. Crit had been in command of the intelligence unit then. They'd brought this fool up to the Shambles safe house, drawn the iron shutters, and taught him the sort of respect that turns to hatred if left untended.

There were dozens, perhaps scores, of Vises he and Strat had made in Sanctuary. If Crit lived long enough, one of them was going to try to kill him. Perhaps this one. Perhaps tonight.

"Vis," he repeated, his voice low. "Right, I remember. Well, let's go, Vis. Let's see what you've got."

"My pleasure. Commander," said the mercenary, and chuckled nas tily. "If you'll follow me into those shadows there, the worst is yet to come."

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"I'm telling you," whispered Kama intently to Straton over her beer,

"Zip's moving the altar stones uptown to the Street of Temples—moving them and what they housed."

Finished, she sat back, eyeing the other patrons of the Vulgar Unicorn surreptitiously. No one had heard, she was certain. She'd been careful of her volume, as well as the drunken slur in her voice. No one human, that is. The fiend who was tending bar late tonight had great gray ears and eyes that looked every which way. His warty countenance was averted, but that meant nothing. In the bronze mirror behind the bar he could be watching them . . .

"So what?" Strat growled, truculent, one arm absently rubbing his damaged shoulder. Perhaps once the best man with weapons among the Stepsons, Strat was doubly wounded now: Ischade either couldn't, or Wouldn't, heal his shoulder and there were no Stepsons here for him to be Mnong.

"So, we've got to stop it," she said. Her heart ached for Strat, and for

iem all, left here where nothing of consequence remained in the wake of er father's leave-taking. She and Strat had something in common now—

amething more than Crit. They had to shore up the sagging bulwark of
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ommand because Tempus might be testing them. None of the others salized it, but Kama did. If her father rode into town of a morning, sady to welcome them back to the fold if only they'd put the town to ights, Kama didn't want to be found wanting.

But the big Stepson was too drunk, or too deeply hurt, to understand

/hat she meant. "Stop it? Why? So Zip's found some sort of pet demon r minor deity—some Ilsig spirit to worship. What difference does it nake? The gods fare no better here than magic—or fighters."

Strat believed only in the magic of Ischade, Kama knew. He'd seen too nuch, too many dead reborn, too many undead abroad in the streets at light. Strat had seen his doom and embraced it: he was as much the

'ampire's creature as any of her slaves.

"C'mon, Straton," she insisted blearily, tugging on the Stepson's leeve. "Come with me. I'll show you."

"You and your lovers," Strat grumbled over the screech of his stool's egs on sawdusted board, "What the frog you wanna do about it if you ind him lickin' his demon's feet?"

"Ssh." Kama warned, and put her small hand to the flat of Strat's

>ack, pushing him toward the door like a wife who'd made a nightly trip o the Unicorn to bring her drunken husband home to bed. Snapper Jo
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aluted her with his raffish inhuman grin, dipping his bristly chin in a

;esture of respect.

Great. Homage from a fiend, friends in high places, estranged from her

•eal friends because of that: because of Molin, who had another wife, Crit ind Gayle and Randal avoided her like the plague. Only Straton, in limilar circumstances, of all the men she'd campaigned with in the Wiz ird Wars, acknowledged her. And Zip . . .

As Strat had jibed, Zip was another of her lovers. Men used their nuscle and their sex for intimidation, and no one thought ill of them for t. Kama was a different sort of operator, but used what she had to. Whatever worked to do the job. It stung her to the quick the way the

•nen she'd fought beside treated her now, simply because she'd let the

-ligh priest wield his influence to help her.

If her father had had a dozen lovers, or a hundred victims of his holy

-aping member, no Sanctuarite would have snickered or presumed to

:riticize. Maybe she should strip her next bed partner at knifepoint, prove herself her father's daughter to one and all. Maybe then Crit would

»top looking past her when they met . . .

Strat stumbled in the doorway, belched, and staggered down the stairs

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to the street. The bay horse whickered, its ears pricked. Kama shivered. The damned thing was dead as a doornail, just didn't know it. Strat didn't seem to know it either: he fumbled in his pouch, came up with a chunk of sugarbeet, and held it out on an open palm.

The ghost-horse's velvet lips delicately snatched the treat, and it snorted in pleasure.

Well, maybe not quite as dead as a doornail. But unnatural as hell. Unnatural as Sanctuary, a place Kama was determined to leave com pletely out of the history she was writing of her father's exploits. Sanctu ary deserved no chronicler, as it deserved nothing more than the oblitera tion it was so obviously seeking.

The town had its own genius, Kama was sure, an Ilsig spirit that had finally had its fill of interlopers and was nudging the place itself toward oblivion's precipice. She wanted only to be quit of it before Sanctuary was razed to the ground by Rankans, gutted and left to rot by Beysibs, or torn stone from off of stone by internal strife.

A historian, Kama knew all the signs of a town dying. Sanctuary didn't lack a one: its gods were impotent; its magic had lost its power; its populace was polarized by generations of hatred; its children wanted only
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to destroy.

"What, Strat?" she said, startled by words undeciphered but still ring ing in her ears. She looked up. The big Stepson was already mounted, reins in his right hand, his left arm carefully resting on one thigh.

"I said, finding Zip should be easy—it's his shift, the dead of night. You want him, let's go up to the command guardpost."

She shook her head-"Told you, he's moving those damned stones. And the porking whatever that lives in 'em, tonight. Heard it from a reliable source." The guardpost was safe for Strat, this time of night—Crit had the day shift; Strat's erstwhile partner spent his evenings in an old Sham bles Cross safe house the Stepsons used to run.

"So where?" Strat's voice was suddenly uneasy.

"Down to the river, soldier. If you can handle it—the White Foal's banks, I mean, so close to Ischade's."

"Pork what I can handle, woman," said Strat, the booze getting to his tongue. "I've picked that snipe up by his collar more than he's picked up your skirts. You wanted help, you've got it. You change your mind, that's fine, too. But we can't just sit here."

She got her horse, her neck hot though the night was chill with the
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bone-deep cold of a recalcitrant spring. Her fingers were numb on her slick reins and the roan she rode bucked and danced under her. The wrong horse for this job, too skittish, too green. But the Stepsons had taken their string, leaving only what wasn't held in common. Except, of

58 AFTERMATH

course, for the single Tros-bred that should have been hers, but had gone to Critias because Tempos wasn't above that sort of insult.

It wasn't fair, but her father had never been. Didn't want a daughter, didn't care however much Kama tried to make him. A woman wasn't consequential, not to him. And her affair with Torchholder had made things worse, not better.

Was Tempus trying to tell her, by giving Crit the horse and forcing Crit to stay on along with her here, that if she went back with Crit, he'd forgive them both? Was Crit being singled out as an acceptable choice?

Or did Tempus just not give a frog's fart?

The latter, most likely. She was going to try to do the same. Try not to care. Try to understand and overcome the trial that was Sanctuary, the
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punishment of being stationed here. But because she was stationed here, assigned like any of his men to onerous duty, she hadn't had the heart to refuse to tarry. That would have been playing on her blood relationship, asking special favors, admitting that she, a woman, couldn't handle hard duty like the men.

Help the garrison commander and the hierarchy restore some order here, that's your job. You're a good intelligence collector. Collect, her fa ther had said to her, but nothing more. Nothing personal, nothing be yond what was said in that meeting where the rear guard was singled out.

And Crit had stared boldly at her across the table in the safe house, knowing already whom Tempus was intending to name as commander in-chief of Sanctuary's disparate armed forces. Knowing she'd have to come to him, be under his command.

It stank. She kicked her roan and slapped its poll and, under diverse and punitive instruction, it settled down. Jogging beside the half-drunken Straton toward the river, she wished she was anywhere else, doing any thing else. Trying to keep Zip from making this sort of mistake wasn't her job, but Crit's.