Soul of the City tw-8 Read online

  Soul of the City

  ( Thievs World - 8 )

  Robert Lynn Asprin

  Robert Lynn Asprin

  Soul of the City

  Dramatis Personae

  The Townspeople

  AHDIOVIZUN; AHDIOMER viz; AHDIO, Proprietor of Sty's Place, a legendary dive within the Maze.

  LALO THE LIMNER, Street artist gifted with magic he does not fully understand.

  GILLA, His indomitable wife.

  ALFI, Their youngest son.

  LATILLA, Their daughter.

  OANNER, Their middle son, slain during the False Plague riots of the previous winter.

  VANDA, Their daughter, employed as maid-servant to the Beysib at the palace.

  WEDEMIR, Their son and eldest child.

  DUBRO, Bazaar blacksmith and husband to Illyra.

  ILLYRA, Half-blood S'danzo seeress with True Sight. Hounded by PFLS in the False Plague.

  ARTON, Their son, marked by the gods and magic as part of an emerging divinity known as the Stormchildren. Sent to the Bandaran Isles for his safety and education.

  ULLIS, Their daughter, slain in the False Plague riots.

  HAKIEM, Storyteller and confidant extraordinaire.

  JUBAL, Prematurely aged former gladiator. Once he openly ran Sanctuary's most visible criminal organization, the Hawkmasks. Now he works behind the scenes.

  SALIMAN, His aide and only friend.

  MAMA BECHO, Owner of a particularly disreputable tavern in Downwind.

  MASHA ZIL-INEEL, Midwife whose involvement with the destruction of the Purple Mage enabled her to move from the Maze to respectability uptown.

  MORIA, One-time Hawkmask and servant to Ischade. She was physically transformed into a Rankan noblewoman by Haught.

  MYRTIS, Madam of the Aphrodesia House.

  SHAFRALAIN, Sanctuary nobleman who can trace his lineage and his money back to the days of llsig's glory.

  ESARIA, His daughter.

  EXPIMILIA, His wife. CUSHARLAIN, His cousin. A customs inspector and investigator.

  SNAPPER JO, A fiend who survived the destruction of magic in Sanctuary.

  STILCHO, Once one of Ischade's resurrected minions, he was "cured" of death when magic was purged from Sanctuary.

  ZIP, Bitter young terrorist. Leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Sanctuary (PFLS).

  The Magicians

  HAUGHT, One-time apprentice of Ischade who betrayed her and is now trapped in a warded house with Roxane.

  ISCHADE, Necromancer and thief. Her curse is passed to her lovers who die from it.

  ROXANE; DEATH'S QUEEN, Nisibisi witch. Nearly destroyed when Stormbringer purged magic from Sanctuary, she is trapped inside a warded house and a dead man's body.

  Others

  THERON, New military Emperor. An usurper placed on the throne with the aid ofTempus and his allies. He has commanded that Sanctuary's walls must be rebuilt by the next New Year Festival.

  The Rankans living in Sanctuary

  CHENAYA; DAUGHTER OF THE SUN, Daughter of LOW an Vigeles, a beautiful and powerful young woman who is fated never to lose a fight. DAYRNE, Her companion and trainer.

  LEYN, OUUEN, DISMAS AND GESTUS, Her friends and fellow gladiators.

  GYSKOURAS, One of the Stormchildren, currently in the Bandar an Isles for education.

  PRINCE KADAKITHIS, Charismatic but somewhat naive half-brother of the recently assassinated Emperor, Abakithis.

  DAPHNE, His estranged wife, living with Chenaya's gladiators at Land's End.

  KAMA; JES, Tempus' daughter. 3rd Commando assassin. Sometime lover of both Zip and Molin Torchholder.

  LOWAN VIGELES, Half-brother of Molin Torchholder, father of Chenaya, a wealthy aristocrat self-exiled to Sanctuary. Owner of the Land's End Estate.

  MOLIN TORCHHOLDER; TORCH, Archpriest and architect of Vashanka; Guardian of the Stormchildren.

  ROSANDA, His estranged wife, living at Land's End.

  RANKAN 3RD COMMANDO, Mercenary company founded by Tempus Thales and noted for its brutal efficiency.

  SYNC, Commander of the 3rd.

  RASHAN; THE EYE OF THE SAVANKALA, Priest and Judge of Sanvankala. Highest ranking Rankan in Sanctuary prior to the arrival of the Prince, now allied with Chenaya's disaffected Rankans at Land's End.

  STEPSONS; SACRED BANDERS, Members of a mercenary unit founded by Abarsis who willed their allegiance to Tempus Thales after his own death. CRITIAS; CRIT, Leftside leader paired with Straton. Second in command after Tempus.

  RANDAL; WITCHY-EARS, The only mage ever trusted by Tempus or admitted into the Sacred Band.

  STRATON; STRAT; ACE, Rightside partner of Critias. Injured by the PFLS at the start of the False Plague riots.

  TASFALEN LANCOTHIS, Jaded nobleman, slain by Ischade's curse, then resurrected by Haught. His body has become Roxane's prison.

  TEMPOS THALES; THE RIDDLER, Nearly immortal mercenary, a partner of Vashanka before that god's demise; commander of the Stepsons; cursed with a fatal inability to give or receive love.

  WALEGRIN, Rankan army officer assigned to the Sanctuary garrison where his father had been slain by the S'danzo many years before.

  The Gods

  DYAREELA, A goddess whose worship in Sanctuary predates the Ilsigi presence and which has been outlawed many times since then.

  HARRAN, Physician and priest to Siveni Gray-Eyes, now part of her four-fold divinity.

  MRIGA, Mindless and crippled woman elevated to four-fold divinity with Siveni Gray-Eyes.

  SABELLIA, Mother goddess for the Rankan Empire.

  SAVANKALA, Father god for the Rankan Empire.

  SIVENI GRAY-EYES, Ilsigi goddess of wisdom, medicine and defense, now transformed into a four-fold diety.

  SHIPRI, Mother goddess of the old Ilsigi kingdom.

  STORMBRINGER, Primal stormgodlwargod. The pattern for all other such gods, he is not, himself, the object of organized worship.

  JIHAN, Froth Daughter. His parthenogenic offspring, betrothed to the Stepson's mage, Randal.

  The Beysib

  SHUPANSEA; SHU-SEA, Head of the Beysib exiles in Sanctuary; mortal avatar of the Beysib mother goddess.

  POWER PLAY by Janet Morris

  Tempus, a mercenary general in the service of Ranke's new emperor, was knee-deep in the bloody purges marking the first winter of Theron's accession to the Rankan throne when the sky above the walled city began to weep black tears.

  By the time dawn should have broken, ashen clouds massed to the very vault of heaven so that not even the Sun God's sharpest rays could pierce the arrayed armies of the night. The city of Ranke, once the brightest jewel of the Rankan empire, shuddered in the dark, her ochre walls stained dusky from the storm's black and ugly might.

  Thunder growled; winds yowled. Black hail pelted Theron's palace, shattering windows and pounding doors. On temple streets and cultured byways it bounced, sharp as diamonds and large as heads, bringing impious priests to their knees and cheap nobles to charity in slick streets covered with greasy slush freezing to ice as black, some said, as their emperor Theron's heart.

  For all knew that Theron had come to power in a coup instigated by the armies-he was a creature of blood, a wild beast of the battlefield. And the proof of this was in the allies who had brought him to the Imperial palace: Nisibisi witches, demons of the black beyond, devils of horrid aspect, even the feared near immortals of the blood cults-Askelon, the lord of dreams, and his brother-in-law Tempus, demigod and favorite son of Vashanka, the Rankan wargod, to name but two- had lent their strength to Theron's cause.

  Did not Tempus still labor at his gory task of purging the disloyal-all who had been influential in Abakithis's court? Did not women still wake to empty beds and
find pouches made of human skin and filled with thirty gold soldats (the Rankan price for one human life) nailed to their boudoir doors?

  Did not those few remaining adherents of Abakithis, former emperor of Ranke (now deceased, unavenged, much cursed in his uneasy grave), still scuttle even through the deadly, knife-sharp hail with bulging pockets to the mercenaries' guildhall to leave their fortunes at the desk with scrawled notes saying, "For Tempus, to distribute as he wills, from the admiring and loyal family of So-and So," while servants spirited noble wives and children out back ways and slumyard gates in beggars' guise?

  Thus it was whispered, as the storm raged unabated into its second day, that Theron and his creature Tempus were to blame for this black blizzard straight from hell.

  It was whispered by a woman to Critias, Tempus's first officer and finest covert actor, who had infiltrated the noble strata of the imperial city; And Crit, with a wry twitch of lips that drew down his patrician nose and a rake of his swordhand through dark, feathery hair, replied to the governor's wife he was bedding: "No one gives a contract for a sunrise, m'lady. No man. that is. Theron is no more than that. When gods throw tantrums, even Tempus listens."

  Crit had fought in the Wizard Wars up north and the woman knew it. His guise was that of a disaffected officer who had renounced his commission after Abakithis's assassination at the Festival of Man and now, like so many others of the old guard, scrambled from allegiance to allegiance in search of safety.

  So the governor's wife just ran a finger along his jaw and smiled commiseratingly as she said, "You men of the armies ... all alike. I suppose you're telling me that this is good? This storm, this hail black as hell? That it's a sign we poor women cannot read?"

  And (thinking of the prognosticators-bits of hair and silver and bone and luck nestled in the pouch dangling from his belt that, with the rest of his clothes, lay in a heap at the foot of another man's bed) Crit replied in Court Rankene, "When the Storm God returns to the armies, wars can be won-not just fought interminably. Without Him, we've just been marking time. If He's angry, He'll let us know on what account. And I'd bet it won't be Theron's-or Tempus's. One's a general whom the soldiers chose exactly because the god had abandoned us during Abakithis's reign; the other is..."

  It was not the woman's hand, reaching low, which made him pause. She wanted Crit's protection; information was what he'd sought here in return. And gotten what he'd come for, and more from this one-all a Rankan lady had to give. So he thought-in a moment of unaccustomed tenderness for one who would likely entertain, on his account, the crowds who'd throng the execution stands when the weather broke-to explain to her about Tempus. About what and who the man Crit had sworn to serve was, and was not.

  He settled for "... Tempus is what Father Enlil-Lord Storm to the armies-wills, and cursed more than Ranke and all her enemies put together. By gods and men, by magic and mages. If there's hell to pay because of Theron's reign, rest assured, lady, it's he who'll suffer in all our steads."

  The Rankan woman, from the look on her face and the hunger on her lips, had lost interest in the subject. But Crit had not. When he left her, he marked her door with a sign for the palace police without even a second thought to the fine body behind it which would soon be lifeless.

  The sky was still black as a witch's crotch and the wind was chorusing its judgment song in a many-throated voice Crit had heard occasionally on the battlefield when Tempus's non-human allies took a hand in this skirmish or that choraling the way it used to when wizard weather blew in Sanctuary, where Crit's partner and his brothers of the Sacred Band were now, down at the empire's most foul and egregious southernmost appurtenance.

  By the time Crit had retrieved his horse, his fingers were playing with the luck charms in his beltpouch. Normally, he'd have pulled them out, squatted down, shaken and thrown them in the straw for guidance.

  But the storm was guidance enough; he didn't need to ask a question he wouldn't like the answer to. If his partner Strat had been on his right tonight, he'd have bet his friend any odds that, when the weather broke, Tempus would come rousting Crit without so much as an explanation and they'd be heading south to Sanctuary where the Sacred Band was quartered for the winter.

  Not that he didn't want to see Strat-he did. Not that he wasn't happy that the Storm god Vashanka, God of the Annies, of Rape and Pillage, of Bloodlust and Fury and Death's Gate, was manifest-he was. What he'd told the Rankan bitch was true-you couldn't win a war without your god. But Vashanka, the Rankan Storm God, had deserted the Stepsons, Crit's unit, in their need. So the unit had taken up with another, perhaps greater, god: Father Enlil.

  And the black, roiling clouds above, the voices which spoke thunder over the fighter's head, were telling a man who didn't like gods much better than magic and who was first officer to a demigod who meddled with both, that Vashanka might not be too pleased with the fickle men who once had slaughtered in His name and now did so in Another's.

  Things were so damned complicated whenever Tempus was .involved.

  Grabbing a tuft of mane, Crit swung up on his warhorse and reined it around so hard it half-reared and then, finding itself headed toward the mercenaries' guild and its own stall, safety and comfort in the storm, fairly bolted through the treacherous, slushy streets of Ranke.

  Despite the darkened ways and chancy footing, Crit let the young horse run, trusting pedestrians, should there be any, to scatter, and armed patrols to recognize him for who and what he was. The horse had a right to comfort, where it could find some. Crit couldn't think of a thing that would do the same for him, now that the gods had dropped one shoe and all he could do was wait until Tempus dropped the other.

  The storm didn't exactly break, but on the fourth day it mellowed.

  By then, Theron and Tempus had summoned Brachis, High Priest of the Variously Named Wargods of Imperial Ranke, and concocted a likely story for the populace.

  Executions, held in abeyance for the first three days of the storm, were resumed. "More purges, obviously. Your Majesty," Brachis had suggested, unctuous to the point of insult, managing by his exaggerated servility to mean the opposite of what he said, "will appease the hungry gods."

  And Theron, old and as gray as the shadows in this newly acquired but not yet conquered palace full of politicians and whores, gave Brachis a tare fully as black as the raging sky outside and said, "Right, priest. Let's have a dozen of your worst enemies bled out in Blood Square by lunch."

  Tempus stayed an impulse to touch his old friend Theron's knee under the table.

  But Brachis didn't rise to Theron's bait. The priest bowed his way out in a swish of copper-beaded robes.

  "God's balls, Riddler," said the aging general to the ageless one, "do you think we've angered the gods? More to the point, do you think we've got one to anger?"

  Theron's jaw jutted so that the pitting of age made it look like a walnut shell, or the snout of the moth-eaten geriatric lion he so much resembled from his thinning, unkempt mane to his scarred and twisted claws. He was a big man still, his power no mere memory, but fresh and flowing in corded veins and leathery sinews-big and powerful in his aged prime, except when seen in close proximity to Tempus, the avatar of Storm Gods on earth, whose yarrow-honey hair and high brow free from lines resembled so much the votive statues of Vashanka still worshiped in the land. Tempus's eyes were long and full of guile, his form heroic, his aspect one of a man on the joyous side of forty, though he'd seen empires rise and fall and fully expected to see the end of this one-to bury Theron as he had and would so many other men, with all their might ranged round them. And Theron knew the truth of it-he'd known Tempus since both were seemingly of an age, fighting the Defender on Wizardwall's skirts when the Rankan Empire was just a babe. The two were honest with one another when it was possible; they were careful when it was not.

  "Got a god to anger? We've got something mad enough to spit, I'll own," Tempus replied. Now, Tempus knew, was not the time to raise false hopes of Vashanka the Mi
ssing God's return in a warrior who'd willingly and knowingly come to a throne whose weight would kill him. It was the dirtiest of jobs, was kingship, and Theron had become the man to do it by default. "If it's Vashanka, then it's a matter between Him and Enlil. Theomachy tends to kill more men than gods. Don't be too anxious to get the armies' hopes up-the war with Myg-donia won't end by gods' wills, any more than it will by Nisi-bisi magic."

  "That's what you think this infernal darkness is, then- magic? Your nemesis, perhaps ... the Nisibisi witch?"

  "Or yours, the Nisibisi warlocks. What matter, gods or magic? If I thought he had the power, I'd pick Brachis as the culprit. He'd do without both of us well enough."

  "We'd do without all of his well enough. But we're stuck with one another, for the nonce. Unless, of course, you've a suggestion... some way to rid me, as the saying has gone from time immemorial, of all meddlesome priests?"

  The two were fencing with words, neither addressing the real problem: the storm was being taken as an omen, and a bad one, on the nature of Theron's rule.

  The aging general fingered a jeweled goblet whose bowl was balanced upon a winged lion and sighed deeply at almost the same time that Tempus's rattling chuckle sounded. "An omen, is it, old lion? Is that what you really want-an omen to make this a mandate from the gods, not a critique?"

  "What / want?" Theron thundered in return, suddenly sweeping up the artsy, jewel-encrusted goblet of state and throwing it so hard against the farther wall that it bounced back to land among the dregs spilled from it and roll eerily, back and forth in a circle, in the middle of the floor.

  Back and forth it rolled, first one way and then the other, making a sound like chariot wheels upon the stone floor, a sound which grew louder and melded with the thunder outside and the renewed clatter of hailstones which resembled horses' hooves, as if a team from heaven was thundering down the blackened sky.