The Dead of Winter Part 7

And the third man was coming in from the side, his knife out and held low in the manner of a man who knew how to use it on other men and had done so before.

His mouth dropped open. The cripple had shown that he could move, and move fast; now he moved even faster, and in a way and direction not at all believable. The knife glittered as it rushed in, its wielder partly crouched and extending his arm, and Throde wasn't there. He ran several steps right up the wall on his attacker's left with all the speed and facility of a frightened cat. Five steps up he wheeled and came dropping like a stone, his right shoulder hunched above the stave he held in both hands. The knife-wielder, going into shock or something like at the absolutely incredible, knew real fear. He made the wrong move. That cost him his eye, which his dodging put into the path of the down rus.h.i.+ng quarterstaff. His cry was a shriek as he went down and Throde landed in a crouch. He had to yank his staff out of the man's eye socket and brain. The last three or four inches were dripping as he turned, crouching, to meet whatever had to be faced and braced next.

That was nothing; mumbling and whimpering, Tarkle was crawling away. Throde's arms quivered under the impetus of adrenaline and excitation, but he stopped himself.

"Guess Throde and me fooled you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," he snarled in the best fakey voice he could find.

Tarkle didn't look back. Tarkle kept right on crawling up the alley toward the light. Throde looked down at his two victims. They lay sprawled ugly, messily.

So what? This was an alley in the Maze: Who cared?

Throde did. Shaking all over and leaning on his staff, he limped back to the house of Alamanthis, and awoke the physician. Then the youth went on home, limping, his staff clacking the street. Throde lived alone.

The following night, Ahdio and Throde worked alone. Once again Ahdio made an announcement, sadly: his woman was gone. That brought groans and embarra.s.sed, chastened faces and expressions of sympathy. It was the first quiet night at Sly's Place in anyone's memory.

On the night following, however, Ahdio and Throde had help. Mostly she stayed behind the bar, pouring, slapping bread and sausage onto wooden plates. She was not attractive and furthermore was specifically unattractive, this new helper in Sly's. Her big chaincoated employer called her Cleya. Remarks were not made to her. No one bothered to approach the counter to get a look at her, in her long and nigh-shapeless gray dress. Ouleh announced that she liked this Cleya. The reason was simple, and it was Frax who put it best: "Whew. Got a face her mother couldn't love and I've saw better figures on brooms."

The woman now publicly called Cleya did not mind. To be with Ahdio at last, she accepted the price, even this. All her life her beauty had after all been more a curse than a blessing. One man, among all men, had treated her as other than an object, a bauble, and he was the only man she had ever loved. Her father and the powerful n.o.ble of wealth, Ezucar, had arranged and forced her marriage to the latter, who wanted an object and a bright and beautiful bauble to wear in public and at his parties. Meanwhile the man she loved had left Suma. Now, years later, she had followed and they were together. The two rooms above the tavern were eminently superior to the servant-staffed mansion of Ezucar. She was sorry that because of her Ahdio had felt that he must take up his Practice again. Yet it was only this once; it was enough and more than enough that at night in their apartment above Sly's Place in the Maze, his spell was off her so that the veil of ugliness was lifted, and she was again his beautiful Jodeera.

THE G.o.d-CHOSEN.

Lynn Abbey

He might have been a stonemason by the way he swung the long-handled hammer save that no solitary stonemason would be working before dawn in the unfinished temple. He might have been a soldier since, when a younger man appeared, he exchanged the hammer for a sword and held his own in a practice session that went on until the sun edged through the leaning stone columns. He was, in fact, a priest-a priest of the Storm G.o.d Vash-anka, and therefore a soldier and stonemason before all else.

He was a Rankan aristocrat: distant nephew to the late, unlamented Emperor; equidistant to the new one as well-though none would have recognized him with sweat making dirty tracks down his back and his black hair hanging in damp, tangled hanks. Indeed, because of the hair and the sweat his peers from the capital would have picked his tall, blond companion as the aristocrat and labelled the priest a Wrigglie or some other conquered mongrel. But there were no observers and none who knew Molin Torchholder mentioned his ancestry.

He'd been born in the gilt nursery of Vashanka's Temple in Ranke-the well-omened offspring of a carefully arranged rape. His father maimed or killed ten men of impeccable lineage before claiming Vashanka's sister, Azyuna, in the seldom enacted Ritual of the Ten-Slaying. It did not matter that Azyuna had been a slave or that she'd died giving birth to him. Molin had been raised with the best his mortal father and Vashanka's cult could offer.

His rise was steady, if not meteoric: An acolyte at age five, he traveled with the army before he was ten. He was fourteen when he engineered the siege at Valtostin, breaching the walls at four places in a single night. Some said he'd become Supreme Hierophant, but his accomplishments in war, destruction and intrigue were not accompanied by the proper deference to his superiors. He'd disappeared, apparently in disgrace, into the inner sanctums of the Imperial Temple, re-emerging in his early thirties to accompany the inconvenient Kadakithis into exile in Sanctuary.

"You'd send half the men on the barricades to an early death," Walegrin, commander of the regular army's garrison in Sanctuary, complimented the priest as they set aside their swords. "Pity the fool who thinks Vashanka's priests are soft."

Molin immersed his face in a bowl of icy water rather than acknowledge Walegrin's admiration. Vashanka's priests were soft, due in no small part to the irremediable absence of the G.o.d himself. Vashanka had died in Sanctuary-died because when a G.o.d is separated from his wors.h.i.+pers, the wors.h.i.+pers go on living-not the G.o.d. And the priests, intermediaries between wors.h.i.+pers and G.o.ds, what of them when a G.o.d had simply vanished? It was not a question Molin enjoyed pondering.

He settled the tunic of a successful tradesman around his shoulders and hid the hammer in a crack between two man-high blocks of stone. "Did the barricades hold last night?" he asked, tucking the sword into a saddle-sheath.

"Our lines held," Walegrin replied with a grimace as they left the enclosure of Vashanka's last, incomplete temple. "There was trouble Downwind between the Stepsons and the rabble-again. And something dead or deadly moving along the White Foal. But nothing to disturb our fish-eyed masters."

It was Ilsday for the Ilsigi, Savankhday for the Rankans and Belly's-day for the Beysin (who demonstrated their barbarism by giving days to their bodies rather than to the G.o.ds); but, most important, it was Market-day. Civil war would abate for one day while partisans and rivals rubbed shoulders in disorder of another kind. The Path of Money, like every other thoroughfare in town, was filled with the intense activity of commerce-legal and otherwise. The pair was separated near the Processional when a food stall erupted in flames. Walegrin, the soldier and representative of such order as the town possessed, went to the merchant's aid and Molin, in the disguise of a merchant himself, found his journey redirected into a tangle of streets.

Here, where a rainbow of painted symbols proclaimed which gangs and factions had been paid off by each household, there was no amnesty and a well-fed man on a well-fed horse was only a moving target. Torchholder shed his merchant's demeanor: straightening his back, holding the reins in one hand while the other rested on his thigh ready to wield whatever weapon his cloak might conceal.

Ragged children gauged his ability to defend himself by shouting epithets combining anatomy and ancestry with an originality a soldier could admire-never guessing that they cursed Vashanka's Hierarch in Sanctuary. He ignored them all as he turned down a sunnier alley.

Then the sunlight vanished. The heavy black clouds which had foretold countless perversions of weather since the Storm G.o.d's demise condensed overhead. A blast of ice-laced wind roared down the alley making the horse rear in panic. The children and beggars struck the moment Molin's attention was on the horse instead of Sanctuary, and the priest found himself in the midst of a deadly little alley-fight even as needle-like pellets of sleet began their own a.s.sault from the sky.

He dropped the reins, a signal to his army-trained horse that it was free to attack, and drew the sword from its saddle-sheath. The odds swung back in his favor once he got a film grip on the hand pressing a knife into his kidney and tossed that urchin back into the street. Whatever his attackers had expected it wasn't a merchant who fought like one of the thrice-d.a.m.ned Stepsons and, though they would have dearly loved to drag this anomaly back to their leader for a closer interrogation, they cowered back under the eaves. Molin gathered the reins, pounded his heels against the gelding's flanks and made a dash for the Palace.

"Send for a groom to take this horse to the stables and see that he's well-cared for," Torchholder demanded when he reached the guardhouse at the West Gate of the Palace, forgetting his torn and dripping tradesman's clothes.

"Forgettin' your place, sc.u.m? I don't take orders from stinkin' Downwind sc.u.m ...".

"Send for a groom-and hope that I forget your face."

The soldier froze-tribute to the instant recognition the Storm Priest's oratory could claim and to the unconcealed rage that accompanied Molin's crisp movements as he wrapped the reins around the guard's trembling hand. The terrified young man hauled away on the stable-gong rope as if his life depended on it.

The storm intensified once the Hierarch stepped into the vast, empty parade ground before the Palace. Lightning grounded in the mud, releasing steam and stench. Those who remembered the terrible storms of the summer had already taken cover in the deepest, driest rooms. Molin glanced at the annex which housed the two children who were, somehow, avatars of both Vashanka and a new, unconsecrated Storm G.o.d, just as lightning caressed it with blue-and-silver. His instinct was to run across the courtyard but his belief that he would survive such bravery was not strong enough; he ducked into one of the stair-niches built into the West Gate.

"My Lord Molin," the bald courtier in rose-and-purple silk said, catching his arm as he strode down the corridors. A mere clothing disguise would never fool a Beysib courtier, accustomed as the Beysibs were to dressing like flowers and dyeing their skin to match. "My Lord Molin, a word with you-"

The Beysibs only called him "Lord" when they were frightened. They had a snake loving b.i.t.c.h for their only G.o.ddess and knew nothing of the temper of Storm G.o.ds. Molin plucked his dripping sleeve from the courtier's hands with all the disdain his anger and frustration could muster. "Tell Shupansea I'll come to the audience chamber when this is over-not before," he said in perfect Rankene rather than in the b.a.s.t.a.r.d argot that pa.s.sed for communication between the cultures.

Lightning reflected off the courtier's scalp as he ran to inform his mistress.

Molin slid behind a dirty tapestry into the honeycomb of narrow pa.s.sages the Ilsigi builders had put in the Palace and which the Beysibs had not yet unraveled. Barely the height and width of an armed man, the pa.s.sages were foul smelling and treacherous, but they kept the remnants of the Rankan Presence in Sanctuary united, to the consternation of their fish-eyed conquerors.

Molin emerged in an alcove where the sounds of the storm were inconsequential in comparison to the fury emanating from a nearby room. An unnatural brilliance filled the corridor before him. His skin tingled when he crossed the sharp line from shadow to light. Thirty-odd years of habit told him to fall to his knees and pray to Vashanka for deliverance-but if Vashanka could have heard him there would have been no need for prayer. He told himself it was no worse than walking on the deck of a sailing s.h.i.+p, and entered the nursery.

The blond, blue-eyed demon he'd named Gyskouras, on the advice of a S'danzo seeress, was the focus of the brilliance. He was shouting as he swung his red glowing toy sword, but the words were lost in the light. The other child, the peaceful child of that S'danzo seeress, had a hold of Gyskouras's leg, trying to pull him away from the motionless body he was battering. Arton, though, was no match for his foster-brother while the G.o.d's rage was in him.

Molin forced himself deeper into the blazing aureole until he could grab the child and lift him from the floor.

"Gyskouras," he bellowed countless times.

The boy fought with the determination of a street urchin: biting, kicking, flailing with the straw-sword until Molin's damp clothes began to steam. But Molin persisted, imprisoning the child's legs first, then trapping his arms beneath his own.

"Gyskouras," he said more gently, as the radiance flickered and the sword fell from the child's hand.

'"Kouras?" the other child echoed, clinging now to both of them.

The light flared once and was gone. Gyskouras became only a frightened child wracked with sobs. Molin stroked the boy's hair, patted him between the shoulders, and glanced down where one of his priests lay in a crumpled heap.

With a gesture and a nod of his head, Torchholder commanded the others to do what had to be done. When he and the children were alone he sat down on a low stool and stood the child in front of him.

"What happened, Gyskouras?"

"He brought porridge," the boy said between sobs and sniffles. "Arton said he had candy but he gave me porridge."

"You are growing very fast, Gyskouras. When you don't eat you don't feel good."

Since they'd brought Arton into the nursery some four months earlier, both children had grown the length of a man's hand from wrist to fingertips. Growing pains were a living nightmare for all concerned. "If you had eaten the porridge I'm sure Aldwist would have given you the candy."

"I wished him dead," Gyskouras said evenly, though when the words were safely out of his mouth he fell forward against Molin. "I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. I told him to get up an' he wouldn't. He wouldn't get up."

It was only Molin's experience with the children that let him make sense out of Gyskouras's garbled syllables-that and the fact that he'd known, in his heart, what had happened as soon as the storm began.

"You didn't know," he repeated softly to convince himself, if not the child.

Gyskouras fell asleep once his sobs subsided; the Storm G.o.d rages always exhausted the small body of their perpetrator. Molin carried an ordinary child to a small bed where, with any luck, he would sleep for two or three days.

'"Kouras can't stay here any longer," Arton said, tugging at the hem of the priest's much-abused tunic.

The S'danzo boy rarely spoke to anyone but his foster-brother. Torchholder let Arton take his hand and lead him to a corner away from the others who were beginning to return to the now-quiet nursery.

"You have to find a place for us, Stepfather."

"I know, I'm looking. When I hear from Gyskouras's father-"

"You cannot wait for Tempus. You must pray. Stepfather Molin."

Talking with Arton was not talking to a milk-toothed child. The seeress had warned him that her son might have the legendary S'danzo ability to foretell the future. At first Molin had refused to believe in the child's p.r.o.nouncements, until Arton had utterly rejected Kadakithis and the Prince had finally owned up to Gyskouras' true paternity. Now he trusted the child completely.

"I have no G.o.ds to pray to, Arton," he explained as he walked toward the door.

"I have only myself and you- remember that."

He pulled the curtain shut. The two acolytes who had been arranging Aldwist's corpse on a simple pallet moved aside to let the Hierarch speak the necessary rites of pa.s.sage. A war-priest, Molin had sanctified the deaths of so many unrecognizable chunks of mortal flesh that nothing could bring a tremor to his voice or gestures. He had come to believe himself truly immune to death's outrages, but the imploded face of the gentle old priest brought twisting pangs of despair to his gut.

"We do not have enough bitterwood for the pyre. Rashan took what we had with him," Isambard, the elder of the two acolytes, informed him.

Molin pressed his fingertips between his eyes, the traditional priestly gesture of respect for the departed and one which, coincidentally, dammed his tears.

Rashan: that conniving, provincial priest whose sole purpose in life, even before Vashanka's death, had been to thwart every reform Molin inst.i.tuted. A cloud of rage worthy of Vashanka swirled up invisibly around Molin Torchholder.

He wanted to confront Rashan, the so-called Eye of Savankala, shove every splintered log of bitter-wood down the whey-faced priest's gullet and use that nonent.i.ty to light Aldwist's pyre. He wanted to take his ceremonial dagger and thrust it so deep in Gyskouras's chest that it would pop out the other side. He wanted to take Isambard's tear-stained face between his hands....

Molin looked at Isambard again, little more than a child himself and unable to hide his grief. He swallowed his rage along with his tears and rested comforting hands on the acolyte's shoulders.

"The Storm G.o.d will welcome Aldwist no matter what wood we use for his pyre.

Come, we three will carry him back to his rooms and you will be his chorus."

They bore their burden in silence. Molin chanted the first chorus with them, then departed for his quarters hoping that the sincerity of the young men's grief would compensate not merely for the missing bitterwood but for Vashanka, Himself, and for his own heart's silence. The priest used another set of pa.s.sageways to reach a curtained vestry behind his priest's sanctum. A robe of fine white wool was waiting for him and Hoxa, his scrivener, could be heard prodding the brazier on the other side of the tapestry-though just barely. His wife, and whatever gaggle of disaffected Rankan women she'd gathered since dawn, were clambering in the antechamber that separated his sanctum from their conjugal quarters.

He pulled the tunic over his shoulders and winced as the cloth reopened a wound he didn't remember taking. Fumbling in the darkness he found a strip of linen, then emerged into his sanctum clad in boots and loincloth; his robe draped over one shoulder; blood running from his left forearm and a strip of linen between his teeth. Hoxa, to his credit, did not drop the goblet of mulled wine.

"My Lord Torchholder-My Lord, you're injured."

Molin nodded as he dropped his robe on top of Hoxa's carefully arranged scrolls and studied the pair of b.l.o.o.d.y horseshoes on his arm. The street urchins, possibly, but more likely Gyskouras. With his good arm and teeth he ripped the linen in two. He pulled a knife from his belt and handed it to Hoxa.

"Hold it above the coals. No sense taking chances-I'd rather have the bite of a sword than the bite of a child any day."

The priest didn't wince when the cautery singed his skin, but after the wound was bandaged he used both trembling hands to carry the goblet to his work-table.

"So tell me Hoxa, what sort of a morning has it been for you?"

"The ladies, Lord Torchholder-," the scrivener began, jerking a shoulder toward the door, beyond which a chorus of feminine voices was raised in unintelligible argument. "Your brother, Lowan Vigeles, has been here looking for his daughter and complaining," Hoxa paused, took a deep breath and continued with a credible imitation of Vigeles's nasal tw.a.n.g, "about the lowness of the Rankan estate in Sanctuary, which is still part of the Empire although you have seen fit to conceal the arrival of a coterie of Beysib exiles, and their poorly defended gold, from the Empire, which could put all that gold to good use in its campaigns rather than see it squandered by Wrigglie sc.u.m and fish-eyed barbarians."

He took another gasping breath. "And the storm shook the windows loose from the walls. Your Lady Wife's gla.s.s from Ranke is ruined and she is in high wrath, I fear-"

Molin rested his head in his hands and imagined Lowan's aristocratic, somewhat vapid face. My brother, he thought to the memory, my dear, blind brother. An a.s.sa.s.sin sits on the Imperial Throne, an a.s.sa.s.sin who sent you running to Sanctuary for your life. In one breath you tell me how desperate, how depraved the Empire has become, and in the next you chide me for abandoning it. You cannot have it both ways, dear brother.

I've told you about Vashanka. It will take many years, generations, before the Empire disappears, but it is dead already, and it will be replaced by the people of the new Vashanka. I've already made my choice.

But the priest had said all this, and more, to his brother and would not say it again. "Hoxa," he said, shaking Lowan from his thoughts, "I've been attacked in the streets; I've been to the nursery where the child has killed one of my oldest friends; my arm is on fire, and you talk to me about my wife! Is there anything worthy of my attention in this forsaken pile of parchment before I go fawn at the feet of Shupansea and tell her everything is under control again?"

"The Mageguild complains that we've not done enough to locate the Tysian Hazard, Randal."

"Not done enough! I've poured twenty soldats into our informers. I'd like to know where the little weasel's vanished to! d.a.m.n Mageguild: Wait till Randal's here; Randal can do that; Randal fought on Wizardwall-he can control the weather. I could control the weather better than that d.a.m.ned pack of incanting fools! Gyskouras is making the ground move. He's three years old and his tantrums are shaking the stones. We'll have to go to the witch-b.i.t.c.h herself if this keeps up-tell them that, Hoxa, with flourishes!"

"Yes, my Lord." He shuffled the scrolls, dropping half of them. "There's the bill from the metal-master Bal.u.s.trus for mending the temple doors. The Third Commando asks for a list of warrants against their enemies; Jubal's proxy asks for warrants against Downwinders and merchants; citizens from the jewelers'

quarter demand warrants against Jubal's lot and half the Commando; everyone wants warrants on the Stepsons-"

"Any word from the Stepsons' Commander?"

"Straton presented his warrant-"

"Hoxa!" Molin looked up from his writing table without moving his head.

"No, Lord Torchholder. There's no reply from Tern-pus."

The enmity between the priest and the not-quite-immortal commander of the Stepsons had never been expressed in words. It was instinctive and mutual on both sides but now, because Kadakithis had admitted that Tempus was the real father of the tantrum-throwing G.o.dlet in the nursery, Molin needed Tempus and Tempus was incommunicado somewhere along Wizardwall.

Torchholder was not, however, allowed the luxury of contemplating the myriad disappointments around him. The door from the antechamber burst open to admit the unhappy figure of his wife, Rosanda.

"I knew you were in here-sneaking around like vermin -avoiding me."

A wife had never been part of Molin's dreams for the future-and certainly not a wife like Brachis had foisted off on him. It was not that the priests of Vashanka were celibate; they had problems enough without such unnatural strictures. Simply put, it was the custom of Vashanka's priests-priests, after all, of the Divine Rapist-to choose rather more casual liaisons among the many Azyunas the temple housed in their cloisters. No Vashankan ever voluntarily plowed the fields with a Celebrant (Hereditary Harridan, in the vernacular) of Sabellia.

"I have affairs in the city which require my presence, Milady Wife," he answered her, not bothering to be polite. "I cannot stand idle each morning while you diddle through your wardrobe."

"You have more important affairs right here. Danlis informs me that no preparations have been made for our Mid-Winter Festival-which, need I remind you, is a mere ten days from now. None of the bitterwood I sent to Ranke for has arrived. Sabellia's sacred hearth will be unpurified and there won't be enough embers for the women to take back to their home-hearths. Now, I know it's too much to think that snake-smitten puppy of a Prince would take his position as Savankala's Flamen seriously enough to attend to these matters, but I would think that you, the ranking Hierarch in Sanctuary, would see that our G.o.ds receive proper respect.

"The Flamens of Ils have set their altars up, the Snake-Chanters have theirs.

Rashan struggles to honor all the G.o.ds without any aid-"

Molin spun the empty goblet between his fingers. "I have no G.o.d. Milady Wife, and precious little interest whether anyone scatters scented ashes this winter.

Did you feel the ground quiver during the storm-"