Janet Morris - Thieves World - Beyond Sanctuary

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In the tempest...
Tempus shouted to Jihan, grabbed her arms in his hands: "Stop this; you can do it. Your pride,
and his, are not worth so many lives." A lightning bolt struck earth beside his foot, so close a blue
sparkling after-charge nuzzled his leg.
She jerked away, palmed her hair back, stood glaring at him with red flecks in her eyes. She
shouted something back, her lips curled in a flash of light, but the gods' roaring blotted out her
words. Then she merely turned her back to him, raised her arms to heaven, and perhaps began to
pray.
He had no more time for her: the gods' war was his…
BEYOND SANCTUARY
JANET MORRIS
Dedication
Beyond Sanctuary is dedicated with respect and affection to Bob Asprin and Lynn Abbey.
And to the entire motley crew of TW writers: Long may we wave.
Contents
Acknowledgement
Book One : WIZARD WEATHER
Book Two : HIGH MOON
Book Three: MAGEBLOOD
Book Four : PEACE FALLS
Book Five : UP WIZARDWALL
Acknowledgment
This novel evolved from a concept and characters developed within the framework of the
collaborative THIEVES' WORLD anthologies edited by Robert Lynn Asprin. Without Bob's
support, patience and enthusiasm, this project would not have been possible. Lynn Abbey provided
invaluable assistance, not only in clarifying logistical considerations and geography, but by providing
me with additional, unpublished material from the Sanctuary universe: her encouragement and
inventiveness are much appreciated. Andrew Offutt and C. J. Cherryh read parts of the manuscript
before publication and made valuable suggestions. Lastly, to all my fellow TW authors, I extend my
heartfelt thanks: every writer who has entered the Sanctuary construct has enriched the whole.
Book One :
WIZARD WEATHER
In the archmage's sumptuous purple bedroom, the woman astride him took two pins from her
silver-shot hair. It was dark—his choice; and damp with cloying shadows—his romanticism. A
conjured moon in a spellbound sky was being swallowed by effigy-clouds where the vaulted roof
indubitably yet arced, even as he shuddered under the tutored and inexorable attentions of the girl
Lastel had brought to his party. She had refused to tell him her name because he would not give his,
but had told him what she would do for him so eloquently with her eyes and her body that he'd
spent the entire evening figuring out a way the two of them might slip up here unnoticed. Not that he
feared her escort's jealousy—though the drug dealer might conceivably entertain such a
sentiment—Lastel no longer had the courage (or the contractual protective wordings) to dare a
reprisal against a Hazard-class mage.
Of all the enchanters in wizard-ridden Sanctuary, only three were archmages, nameless adepts
beyond summoning or responsibility, and this Hazard was one. In fact, he was the very strongest of
those three. When he had been young, he had had a name, but he will forget it, and everything else,
quite promptly.
The domed and spired estuary of venality which is Sanctuary, nadir of the empire called Ranke;
the unmitigated evil he had fielded for decades from his swamp-encircled mageguild fortress; the
compromises he had made to hold sway over curmudgeon, courtesan and criminal (so audacious
that even the bounds of magics and planeworlds had been eroded by his efforts, and his fellow
adepts felled on occasion by demons roused from forbidden defiles to do his bidding here at the
end of creation where no balance remains between logic and faith, law and nature, or heaven and
hell); the disingenuous methods through which his will was worked, plan by tortuous plan, upon a
town so hateful and immoral that both the flaunted gods and magicians' devils agreed that its
inhabitants deserved no less dastardly a fate—all of this, and more, will fade from him in the time it
takes a star to burn out, falling from the sky.
Now, the First Hazard glimpses her movement, though he is close to ejaculation, sputtering with
sensations that for years he has assumed he had outgrown, or forgotten how to feel. Senility creeps
upon the finest flesh when a body is maintained for millennia, and into the deepest mind, through
thousands of years. He doesn't look his age, or tend to think of it. The years are his, mandated.
Only a very special kind of enemy could defeat him, and those were few and far between. Simple
death, morbidity or the spells of his brothers were like gnats he kept away by the perfume of his
sweat: merely the proper diet, herbs and spells and consummated will, had long ago vanquished
them as far as he was concerned.
So strange to lust, to desire a particular woman; he was amused, joyous; he had not felt so good
in years. A tiny thrill of caution had horripilated his nape early on, when he noticed the silvering of
her nightblack hair, but this girl was not old enough to be—"Ahhh!" Her premeditated rippling takes
him over passion's edge, and he is falling, place and provenance forgotten, not a terrible adept
wrenching the world about to suit his whim and comfort, but just a man.
In that instant, eyes defocused, he sees but does not note the diamond sparkle of the rods
poised above him; his ears are filled with his own breathing; the song of entrapment she sings softly
has him before he thinks to think, or thinks to fear, or thinks to move.
By then, the rods, their sharp fine points touching his arched throat, owned him. He could not
move; not his body nor his soul responded; his mind could not control his tongue. Thinking bitterly
of the indignity of being frozen like a rearing stallion, he hoped his flesh would slump once life had
fled. As he felt the points enter into his skin and begin to suck at the thread binding him to life, his
mortification marshaled his talents: he cleared his vision, forced his eyes to obey his mind's
command. Though he was a great sorcerer, he was not omnipotent: he couldn't manage to make his
lips frame a curse to cast upon her, just watched the free agent Cime—who had slipped, disguised,
into so many mages' beds of late—sip the life from him relishingly. So slow she was about it he had
time to be thankful she did not take him through his eyes. The song she sings has cost her much to
learn, and the death she staves off will not be so kind as his. Could he have spoken, then, resigned
to it, he would have thanked her: it is no shame to be brought down by an opponent so worthy.
They paid their prices to the same host. He set about composing his exit, seeking his meadow,
starshaped and evergreen, where he did his work when meditation whisked him into finer
awarenesses than flesh could ever share. If he could seat himself there, in his established place of
power, then his death was nothing, his flesh a fingernail, overlong and ready to be pared.
He did manage that. Cime saw to it that he had the time. It does not do to anger certain kinds of
powers, the sort which having dispensed with names, dispense with discorporation. Some awful
day, she would face this one, and others whom she had guided out of life, in an afterlife which she
had helped populate. Shades tended to be unforgiving.
When his chest neither rose nor fell, she slid off him and ceased singing. She licked the tips of
her wands and wound them back up in her thick black hair. She soothed his body down, arranged
it decorously, donned her party clothes, and kissed him once on the tip of his nose before heading,
humming, back down the stairs to where Lastel and the party still waited. As she passed the bar,
she snatched a piece of citrus and crushed it in her palms, dripping the juice upon her wrists,
smearing it behind her ears and in the hollow of her throat. Some of these folk might be clumsy
necromancers and thrice-cursed merchants with store-bought charms-to-ward-off-charms bleeding
them dry of soul and purse, but there was nothing wrong with their noses.
Lastel's bald head and wrestler's shoulders, impeccable in customed silk velvet, were easy to
spot. He didn't even glance down at her, but continued chatting with one of the prince/ governor
Kadakithis' functionaries, Molin Something-or-other, Vashanka's official priest. It was New Year's
holiday, and the week was bursting with festivities which the Rankan overlords must observe, and
seem to sanction: since (though they had conquered and subjugated Ilsig lands and Ilsig peoples so
that some Rankans dared call llsigs "Wrigglies" to their faces) they had failed to suppress the
worship of the god Us and his self-begotten pantheon, word had come down from the emperor
himself that Rankans must endure with grace the Wrigglies' celebration of Us' creation of the world
and renewal of the year. Now, especially, with Ranke pressed into a war of attrition in the north,
was no time to allow dissension to develop on her flanks from so paltry a matter as the perquisites
of obscure and weakling gods.
This uprising among the buffer states on Upper Ranke's northernmost frontier and the inflated
rumors of slaughter coming back from Wizardwall's mountainous skirts all out of proportion to
reasonable numbers dominated Molin's monologue: "And what say you, esteemed lady? Could it be
that Nisibisi magicians have made their peace with Mygdon's barbarian lord, and found him a path
through Wizardwall's fastness? You are well-traveled, it is obvious… Could it be true that the
border insurrection is Mygdonia's doing, and their hordes so fearsome as we have been led to
believe? Or is it the Rankan treasury that is suffering, and a northern incursion the cure for our
economic ills?"
Lastel flickered puffy lids down at her from ravaged cheeks and his turgid arm went around her
waist. She smiled up at him reassuringly, then favored the priest: "Your Holiness, sadly I must
confess that the Mygdonian threat is very real. I have studied realms and magics, in Ranke and
beyond. If you wish a consultation, and Lastel permits—" she batted the thickest lashes in
Sanctuary "—I shall gladly attend you, some day when we both are fit for 'solemn' discourse. But
now I am too filled with wine and revel, and must interrupt you—your pardon please—that my
escort bear me home to bed." She cast her glance upon the ballroom floor, demure and
concentrating on her slippered feet poking out under amber skirts. "Lastel, I must have the night air,
or faint away. Where is our host? We must thank him for a more complete hospitality than I'd
thought to find…"
The habitually pompous priest was simpering with undisguised delight, causing Lastel to raise an
eyebrow (though Cime tugged coquettishly at his sleeve) and inquire as to its source: "Lord Molin?"
"It is nothing, dear man, nothing. Just so long since I have heard court Rankene—and from the
mouth of a real lady…" The Rankan priest, knowing well that his wife's reputation bore no
mitigation, chose to make sport of her, and of his town, before the foreign noblewoman did. And to
make it more clear to Lastel that the joke was on them—the two Sanctuarites— and for the
amusement of the voluptuous gray-eyed woman, he bowed low, and never did answer her genteel
query as to the whereabouts of the First Hazard.
By the time he had promised to give their thanks and regards to the absent host when he saw
him, the lady was gone, and Molin Torchholder was left wishing he knew what it was that she saw
in Lastel. Certainly it was not the dogs he raised, or his fortune, which was modest, or his
business… well, yes, it might have been just that… drugs. Some who knew said the best
krrf—black and Garonne-stamped—came from Lastel's connections. Molin sighed, hearing his
wife's twitter among the crowd's buzz. Where was that Hazard? The damn mage-guild was getting
too arrogant. No one could throw a bash as starstudded as this one and then walk away from it as
if the luminaries in attendance were nonentities. He was glad he hadn't prevailed on the prince to
come along… What a woman! And what was her name? He had been told, he was sure, but just
forgot…
Outside, torchlit, their breath steaming white through cold-sharpened night air, waiting for their
ivory-screened wagon, they giggled over the distinction between "serious" and "solemn": the First
Hazard had been serious, Molin was solemn; Tempus the Hell Hound was serious, Prince
Kadakithis, solemn; the destabilization campaign they were undertaking in Sanctuary under the
auspices of a Mygdonian-funded Nisibisi witch (who had come to Lastel, alias One-Thumb, in the
guise of a comely caravan mistress hawking Garonne drugs) was serious; the threat of northern
invasion, downcountry at the Empire's anus, was most solemn. As her laughter tinkled, he nuzzled
her: "Did you manage to… ?"
"Oh, yes. I had a perfectly lovely time. What a wonderful idea of yours this was," she
whispered, still speaking court Rankene, a dialect she had been using exclusively in public ever since
the two of them—the Maze-dweller One-Thumb and the escaped sorcerer-slayer Cime—had
decided that the best cover for them was that which her magic provided: they need not do more.
Her brother Tempus knew that Lastel was actually One-Thumb, and that she was with him, but he
would hesitate to reveal them: he had given his silence, if not his blessing, to their union. Within
reasonable limits, they considered themselves safe to bargain lives and information to both sides in
the coming crisis. Even now, with the war barely under way, they had already started. This night's
work was her pleasure and his profit. When they reached his modest east-side estate, she showed
him the portion of what she had done to the first Hazard which he would like best—and most
probably survive, if his heart was strong. For her service, she demanded a Rankan soldat's worth of
black krrf, before the act. When he had paid her, and watched her melt it with water over a flame,
cool it, and bring it to him on the bed, her fingers stirring the viscous liquid, he was glad he hadn't
argued about her price, or about her practice of always charging one.
* * *
Wizard weather blew in off the sea later that night as quickly as one of the Sanctuary whores
could blow a client a kiss or a pair of Stepsons disperse an unruly crowd. Everyone in the suddenly
mist-enshrouded streets of the Maze ran for cover; adepts huddled under beds with their best
warding spells wrapped tighter than blankets around shivering shoulders; east-siders bade their
jesters perform and their musicians play louder; dogs howled; cats yowled; horses screamed in the
palace stables and tried to batter their stallboards down.
Some unlucky ones did not make it to safety before a dry thunder roared and lightning flashed
and in the streets, the mist began to glitter, thicken, chill. It rolled head-high along byway and alley,
claws of ice scrabbling at shuttered windows, barred doors. Where it found life, it shredded bodies,
lacerating limbs, stealing away warmth and souls and leaving only flayed carcasses frozen in the
streets.
A pair of Stepsons—mercenary special forces whom the prince's marshal, Tempus,
commanded—was caught out in the storm, but it could not be said that the weather killed one: the
team had been investigating uncorroborated reports that a warehouse conveniently situated at a
juncture of three major sewers was being used by an alchemist to concoct and store incendiaries.
The surviving partner guessed that his teammate must have lit a torch, despite the cautions of
research: human wastes, flour, sulphur and more had gone in through those now-nonexistent doors.
Though the problem the team had been dispatched to investigate was solved by a concussive
fireball that threw the second Stepson, Nikodemos, through a window into an intersection, singeing
his beard and brows and eyelashes, the young Sacred Band member relived the circumstances
leading to his partner's death repeatedly, agonizing over the possibility that he was to blame
throughout the night, alone in the pair's billet. So consumed was he with grief at the death of his
mate, he did not even realize that his friend had saved his life: the fireball and ensuing conflagration
had blown back the mist and made an oven of the wharfside; Wideway was freed from the vicious
fog for half its length. He had ridden at a devil's pace out of Sanctuary home to the Stepsons'
barracks, which once had been a slaver's estate and thus had rooms enough for Tempus to allow
his hard-won mercenaries the luxury of privacy: ten pairs plus thirty single agents comprised the
team's core group—until this evening past…
Sun was trying to beat back the night, Niko could see it through his window. He had not even
been able to return with a body. His beloved spirit-twin would be denied the honor of a hero's fiery
bier. He couldn't cry; he simply sat, huddled, amputated, diminished and cold upon his bed,
watching a sun-ray inch its way toward one of his sandaled feet.
Thus he did not see Tempus approaching with the first light of day haloing his just-bathed form
as if he were some god's own avatar, which at times—despite his better judgment—his curse, and
his battle with it, forced him to become. The tall, autumnal figure stooped and peered in the
window, sun gilding his yarrow-honey hair and his vast bronze limbs where they were free of his
army-issue woolen chiton. He wore no arms or armor, no cloak or shoes; furrows deepened on his
brow, and a sere frown tightened his willful mouth. Sometimes, the expression in his long, slitted
eyes grew readable: this was such a time. The pain he was about to face was a pain he had known
too well, too often. It brought to features not brutal enough by half for their history or profession the
slight, defensive smile which would empty out his eyes. When he could, he knocked. Hearing no
reply, he called softly, "Niko?" And again…
Having let himself in, he waited for the Stepson, who looked younger than the quarter-century
he claimed, to raise his head. He met a gaze as blank as his own and bared his teeth.
The youth nodded slowly, made to rise, sank back when Tempus motioned "stay" and joined
him on his woodframed cot in blessed shadow. Both sat then, silent, as day filled up the room,
stealing away their hiding place. Elbows on knees, Niko thanked him for coming. Tempus suggested
that under the circumstances a bier could still be made, and funerary games would not be out of
order. When he got no response, the mercenary's commander sighed rattlingly and allowed that he
himself would be honored to perform the rites. He knew how the Sacred Banders who had
adopted the war name "Stepsons" revered him. He didn't condone or encourage it, but since they
had given him their love and were probably doomed to the man for it—even as their original leader,
Stepson, called Abarsis, had been doomed—Tempus felt responsible for them. His instructions and
his curse had sent the gelded warrior-priest Abarsis to his death, and such fighters as these could
not offer loyalty to a lesser man, to a pompous prince or an abstract cause. Sacred Bands were the
mercenaries' elite; this one's history under the Slaughter Priest's command was nearly mythical;
Abarsis had brought his men to Tempus before committing suicide in a most honorable fashion,
leaving them as his parting gift—and as his way of ensuring that Tempus could not just walk away
from the god Vashanka's service: Abarsis had been Vashanka's priest.
Of all the mercenaries Rankan money had enabled Tempus to gather for Prince/Governor
Kadakithis, this young recruit was the most singular. There was something remarkable about the
finely made slate-haired fighter with his quiet hazel eyes and his understated manner, something that
made it seem perfectly reasonable that this self-effacing youngster with his clean long limbs and his
quick canny smile had been the right-side partner of a Syrese legend twice his age for nine years.
Tempus would rather have been doing anything else than trying to give comfort to the bereaved
Stepson Nikodemos. Choosing a language appropriate to philosophy and grief (for Niko was fluent
in six tongues, ancient and modern), he asked the youth what was in his heart.
"Gloom," Niko responded in the mercenary-argot, which admitted many tongues, but only the
bolder emotions: pride, anger, insult, declaratives, imperatives, absolutes.
"Gloom," Tempus agreed in the same linguistic pastiche, yet ventured: "You'll survive it. We all
do."
"Oh, Riddler… I know… You did, Abarsis did—twice," he took a shivering breath; "but it's not
easy. I feel so naked. He was… always on my left, if you understand me—where you are now."
"Consider me here for the duration, then, Niko." Niko raised too-bright eyes, slowly shaking his
head. "In our spirits' place of comfort, where trees and men and life are one, he is still there. How
can I rest, when my rest-place holds his ghost? There is no moat left for me… do you know the
word?"
Tempus did: balance, equilibrium, the tendency of things to make a pattern, and that pattern to
be discernible, and therefore revivifying. He thought for a moment, gravely—not about Niko's
problem, but about a youthful mercenary who spoke offhandedly of adept's refreshments and
archmagical meditations, who routinely transported his spirit into a mystical realm and was
accustomed to meeting another spirit there. He said at last: "I don't read it ill that your friend waits
there. Why is it bad, unless you make it so? Moat, if you have had it, you will find again. With him,
you are bound in spirit, not just in flesh. He would be hurt to hurt you, and to see you afraid of what
once you loved. His spirit will depart your place of relaxation when we put it formally to rest. Yet
you must make a better peace with him and surmount your fear. It's well to have a friendly soul
waiting at the gate when your time comes around. Surely you love him still?"
That broke the young Stepson, and Tempus left him curled up on his bed so that his sobs need
not be silent and he could heal upon his own.
Outside, leaning against the doorjamb, the planked door carefully closed, Tempus put his fingers
to the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes. He had surprised himself as well as the boy, offering
Niko such far-reaching support. He wasn't sure he dared to mean it, but he had said it. Niko's team
had functioned as the Stepsons' ad hoc liaisons, coordinating (but more usually arbitrating disputes
among) the mercenaries and the Hell Hounds (the Rankan Imperial Elite Guards), the Ilsig regular
army and the militia Tempus was trying to covertly form out of some carefully-chosen street urchins,
slit purses, and sleeves—the real rulers of this overblown slum and the only people who ever knew
what was going on in Sanctuary, a town which just might become a strategic staging area if war did
come down from the north. As liaisons, both teammates had come to him often for advice. Part of
Niko's workload had been the making of an adequate swordsman out of a certain Ilsig thief named
Hanse, to whom Tempus had owed a debt he did not care to discharge personally. But the young
backstreeter, emboldened by his easy early successes, had proved increasingly irascible and
contentious when Niko—aware that Tempus was indebted to Hanse and that Kadakithis
inexplicably favored the thief—endeavored to lead him far beyond slash-and-thrust infantry tactics
into the subtleties of Niko's own expertise: cavalry strategies, guerilla tactics, western fighting forms
that dispensed with weaponry by accenting surprise, precision, and meditation-honed instinct.
Though the thief recognized the value of what the Stepson offered, his pride made him sneer: he
couldn't admit his need to know, would not chance being found wanting, and hid his fear of failure
behind anger. After three months of justifying the value of methods and mechanics the Stepson felt
to be self-explanatory (black stomach blood, bright lung blood, or pink foam from the ears indicates
a mortal strike; yarrow root shaved into a wound quells its pain; ginseng, chewed, renews stamina;
mandrake in an enemy's stewpot incapacitates a company, monkshood decimates one; green or
moldy hay downs every horse on your opponents' line; cheese wire, the right handhold, or a knife
from behind obviates the need for passwords, protracted dissembling, or forged papers) Niko had
turned to Tempus for a decision as to whether instruction must continue: Shadowspawn, called
Hanse, was a natural bladesman, as good as any man wishing to wield a sword for a living needed
to be—on the ground, Niko had said. As far as horsemanship, he had added almost sadly, niceties
could not be taught to a cocky novice who spent more time arguing that he'd never need to master
them than practicing what he was taught. Similarly, so far as tradecraft went, Hanse's fear of being
labelled a Stepson-in-training or an apprentice Sacred Bander prevented him from fraternizing with
the squadron during the long evenings when shoptalk and exploits flowed freely, and every man
found much to learn. Niko had shrugged, spreading his hands to indicate an end to his report.
Throughout it (the longest speech Tempus had ever heard the Stepson make), Tempus could not fail
to mark the disgust so carefully masked, the frustration and the unwillingness to admit defeat which
had hidden in Nikodemos' lowered eyes and blank face. Tempus' decision to pronounce the student
Shadowspawn graduated, gift him with a horse, and go on to new business had elicited a subtle
inclination of head—an agreement, nothing less—from the youthful and eerily composed junior
mercenary. Since then, he hadn't seen him. And, upon seeing him, he had not asked any of the
things he had gone there to find out: not one question as to the exact circumstances of his partner's
death, or the nature of the mist which had ravaged the Maze, had passed his lips. Tempus blew out
a noisy breath, grunted, then pushed off from where he leaned against the whitewashed barracks
wall. He would go out to see what headway the band had made with the bier and the games, set for
sundown behind the walled estate. He did not need to question the boy further, only to listen to his
own heart.
He wasn't unaware of the ominous events of the preceding evening: sleep was never his. He had
made a midnight creep through the sewage tunnels into Kadakithis' most private apartments,
demonstrating that the old palace was impossible to secure, in hopes that the boy-prince would stop
prattling about "winter palace/summer palace" and move his retinue into the new fortress Tempus
had built for him on the eminently defensible spit near the lighthouse with that very end in mind. So it
was that he had heard firsthand from the prince (who all the while was making a valiant attempt not
to bury his nose in a scented handkerchief he was holding almost casually but had fumbled
desperately to find when first Tempus appeared, reeking of sewage, between two of his damask
bedroom hangings) about the killer mist and the dozen lives it claimed. Tempus had let his silence
agree that the mages must be right, such a thing was totally mystifying, though the "thunder without
rain" and its results had explained itself to him quite clearly. Nothing is mysterious after three
centuries and more of exploring life's riddles, except perhaps why gods allow men magic, or why
sorcerers allow men gods.
Equally reticent was Tempus when Kadakithis, wringing his lacquer-nailed hands, told him of the
First Hazard's unique demise, and wondered with dismal sarcasm if the adepts would again try to
blame the fall of one of their number on Tempus' alleged sister (here he glanced sidelong up at
Tempus from under his pale Imperial curls), the escaped mage-killer who, he was beginning to
think, was a figment of sorcerers' nightmares: When they'd had this "person" in the pits, awaiting trial
and sentence, no two witnesses could agree on the description of the woman they saw; when she
had escaped, no one saw her go. It might be that the adepts were purging their Order again, and
didn't want anyone to know, didn't Tempus agree? In the face of Kadakithis' carefully thought-out
policy statement, meant to protect the prince from involvement and the soldier from implication,
Tempus refrained from comment.
The First Hazard's death was a welcome surprise to Tempus, who indulged in an active, if
surreptitious, bloodfeud with the mageguild. Sortilege of any nature he could not abide. He had
explored and discarded it all: philosophy, systems of personal discipline such as Niko employed,
magic, religion, the sort of eternal side-taking purveyed by the warrior-mages who wore the Blue
Star. The man who in his youth had proclaimed that those things which could be touched and
perceived were those which he preferred had not been changed by time, only hardened. Adepts
and sorcery disgusted him. He had faced wizards of true power in his youth, and his sorties upon
the bloody roads of life had been colored by those encounters: he yet bore the curse of one of their
number, and his hatred of them was immortal. He had thought that even should he die, his despite
would live on to harass them—he hoped that it were true. For to fight with enchanters of skill, the
same skills were needed, and he eschewed those arts. The price was too high. He would never
acknowledge power over freedom; eternal servitude of the spirit was too great a cost for mastery in
life. Yet a man could not stand alone against witchfire hatred. To survive, he had been forced to
make a pact with the Storm God, Vashanka. He had been brought to collar like a wild dog. He
heeled to Vashanka, these days, at the god's command. But he didn't like it.
There were compensations, if such they could be called. He lived interminably, though he could
not sleep at all; he was immune to simple, nasty war-magics; he had a sword which cut through
spells like cheese and glowed when the god took an interest. In battle he was more than twice as
fast as a mortal man—while they moved so slowly he could do as he willed upon a crowded field
which was a melee to all but him and even extend his hyper speed to his mount, if the horse was of
a certain strain and tough constitution. And wounds he took healed quickly—instantly if the god
loved him that day, more slowly if they had been quarreling. Only once—when he and his god had
had a serious falling-out over whether or not to rape his sister—had Vashanka truly deserted him.
But even then, as if his body were simply accustomed to doing it, his regenerative abilities
remained—much slowed, very painful, but there.
For these reasons, and many more, he had a mystique, but no charisma. Only among
mercenaries could he look into eyes free from the glint of fear. He stayed much among his own,
these days in Sanctuary. Abarsis' death had struck home harder than he cared to admit. It seemed,
sometimes, that one more soul laying down its life for him and one more burden laid upon him
would surpass his capacity and he would crack apart into the dessicated dust he doubtless was.
Crossing the whitewashed court, passing the stables, his Trôs horses stuck steel-gray muzzles
over their half-doors and whickered. He stopped and stroked them, speaking soft words of
comradeship and endearment, before he left to let himself out the back gate to the training ground, a
natural amphitheatre between hillocks where the Stepsons drilled the few furtive Ilsigs wishing to
qualify for the militia-reserves Kadakithis was funding.
He was thinking, as he closed the gate behind him and squinted out over the arena (counting
heads and fitting names to them where men sat perched atop the fence or lounged against it or
raked sand or counted off paces for sunset's funerary games), that it was a good thing no one had
been able to determine the cause of the ranking Hazard's death. He would have to do something
about his sister Cime, and soon—something substantive. He'd given her the latitude befitting a
probable sibling and childhood passion, and she had exceeded his forbearance. He'd been willing to
overlook the fact that he had been paying her debts with his soul ever since an archmage had cursed
him on her account, but he was not willing to ignore the fact that she refused to abstain from taking
down magicians. It might be her right, in general, to slay sorcerers, but it was not her right to do it
here, where he was pinned tight between law and morality as it was. The whole conundrum of how
he might successfully deal with Cime was something he did not want to contemplate. So he did not,
just then, only walked, cold brown grass between his toes, to the near side of the chest-high
wooden fence behind which, on happier days, his men schooled Ilsigs and each other. Today they
were making a bier there, dragging dry branches from the brake beyond Vashanka's altar, a pile of
stones topping a rise due east, where the charioteers worked their teams.
Sweat never stayed long enough to drip in the chill winter air, but breaths puffed white from
noses and mouths in the taut pearly light, and grunts and taunts carried well on the crisp morning
breeze. Tempus ducked his head and rubbed his mouth to hide his mirth as a stream of scatological
invective sounded: one of the branch-draggers exhorting the loungers to get to work. Were curses
soldats, the Stepsons would all be men of ease. The fence-sitters, counter-cursing the work-boss
gamely, slipped to the ground; the loungers gave up their wall. In front of him, they pretended to be
untouched by the ill-omen of accidental death. But he, too, was uneasy in the face of tragedy
without reason, bereft of the glory of death in the field. All of them feared accident, mindless
fortune's disfavor: they lived by luck, as much as by the god's favor. As the dozen men, more or less
in a body, headed toward the altar and the brake beyond, Tempus felt the god rustling inside him
and took time to upbraid Vashanka for wasting an adherent. They were not on the best of terms,
the man and his god. His temper was hard-held these days, and the gloom of winter quartering was
making him fey—not to mention reports of the Mygdonians' foul depredations to the far north, the
quelling of which he was not free to join...
First, he noticed that two people sauntering casually down the altar's hillock toward him were
not familiar; and then, that none of his Stepsons were moving: each was stockstill. A cold overswept
him, like a wind-driven wave, and rolled on toward the barracks. Above, the pale sky clouded
over; a silky dusk swallowed the day. Black clouds gathered; over Vashanka's altar two luminous,
red moons appeared high up in the inky air, as if some huge night-cat lurked on a lofty perch.
Watching the pair approaching (through unmoving men who didn't even know they stood now in
darkness), swathed in a pale nimbus which illuminated their path as the witch-cold had heralded
their coming, Tempus muttered under his breath. His hand went to his hip, where no weapon lay,
but only a knotted cord. Studying the strangers without looking at them straight-on, leaning back,
his arms outstretched along the fencetop, he waited.
The red lights glowing above Vashanka's altar winked out. The ground shuddered; the altar
stones tumbled to the ground. Wonderful, he thought. Just great. He let his eyes slide over his
men, asleep between blinks, and wondered how far the spell extended, whether they were
ensorceled in their bunks, or in the mess, or on their horses as they made their rounds in the country
or the town.
Well, Vashanka? he tested. It's your altar they took down. But the god was silent.
Besides the two coming at measured pace across the ground rutted with chariot tracks, nothing
moved. No bird cried or insect chittered, no Stepson so much as snored. The companion of the
imposing man in the thick, fur mantle had him by the elbow. Who was helping whom, Tempus could
not at first determine. He tried to think where he had seen that austere face—soul-shriveling eyes so
sad, bones so fine and yet full of vitality beneath the black, silver-starred hair—and then blew out a
sibilant breath when he realized what power approached over the rutted, Sanctuary ground. The
companion, whose lithe musculature and bare, tanned skin were counterpointed by an enameled
tunic of scale-armor and soft low boots, was either a female or the prettiest eunuch Tempus had
ever seen—whichever, she/he was trouble, coming in from some nonphysical realm on the arm of
the entelechy of a shadow lord, master of the once-in-a-while archipelago that bore his name:
Aškelon, lord of dreams.
When they reached him, Tempus nodded carefully and said, very quietly in a noncommittal way
that almost passed for deference, "Salutations, Ash. What brings you into so poor a realm?"
Aškelon's proud lips parted; the skin around them was too pale. It was a woman who held his
摘要：

 Inthetempest... TempusshoutedtoJihan,grabbedherarmsinhishands:"Stopthis;youcandoit.Yourpride,andhis,arenotworthsomanylives."Alightningboltstruckearthbesidehisfoot,socloseabluesparklingafter-chargenuzzledhisleg.Shejerkedaway,palmedherhairback,stoodglaringathimwithredflecksinhereyes.Sheshoutedsomethi...

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