Shadows of Sanctuary

A MAN AND HIS GOD by Janet Morris

1

Solstice storms and heat lightning beat upon Sanctuary, washing the dust from the gutters and from the faces of the mercenaries drifting through town on their way north where (seers proclaimed and rumour corroborated) the Rankan Empire would soon be hiring multitudes, readying for war.

The storms doused cookfires west of town, where the camp followers and artificers that Sanctuary's ramshackle facilities could not hold had overflowed. There squatted, under stinking ill-tanned hide pavilions, custom weaponers catering to mercenaries whose eyes were keener than the most carefully wax forged iron and whose panoplies must bespeak their whereabouts in battle to their comrades; their deadly efficacy to strangers and combatants; the dear cost of their hire to prospective employers. Fine corselets, cuirasses ancient and modern, custom's best axes and swords, and helmetry with crests dyed to order could be had in Sanctuary that summer; but the downwind breeze had never smelled fouler than after wending through their press.

Here and there among the steaming firepots siegecrafters and commanders of fortifications drilled their engineers, lest from idleness picked men be suborned by rival leaders seeking to upgrade their corps. To keep order here, the Emperor's haifbrother Kadakithis had only a handful of Rankan Hell Hounds in his personal guard, and a local garrison staffed by indigenous Ilsigs, conquered but not assimilated. The Rankans called the Ilsigs 'Wrigglies', and the Wrigglies called the Rankans naked barbarians and their women worse, and not even the rain could cool the fires of that age-old rivalry.

On the landspit north of the lighthouse, rain had stopped work on Prince Kadakithis's new palace. Only a man and horse, both bronze, both of heroic proportions, rode the beach. Doom criers of Sanctuary, who once had proclaimed their town 'just left of heaven', had changed their tune: they had dubbed Sanctuary Death's Gate and the one man, called Tempus, Death Himself.

He was not. He was a mercenary, envoy of a Rankan faction desirous of making a change in emperors; he was a Hell Hound, by Kadakithis's good offices; and marshal of palace security, because the prince, not meant to triumph in his governorship exile, was understaffed. Of late Tempus had become a royal architect, for which he was as qualified as any man about, having fortified more towns than K-adakithis had years. The prince had proposed the site; the soldier examined it and found it good. Not satisfied, he had made it better, dredging deep with oxen along the shore while his imported fortifications crews raised double walls of baked brick filled with rubble and faced with stone. When complete, these would be deeply crenellated for archers, studded with gatehouses, double-gated and sheer. Even incomplete, the walls which barred the folk from spit and lighthouse grinned with a death's-head smirk towards the town, enclosing granaries and stables and newly whiled barracks and a spring for fresh water: if War came hither, Tempus proposed to make Him welcome for a long and arduous siege.

The fey, god's-breath weather might have stopped work on the construction, but Tempus worked without respite, always: it eased the soul of the man who could not sleep and who had turned his back upon his god. This day, he awaited the arrival of Kadakithis and that of his own anonymous Rankan contact, to introduce emissary to possible figurehead, to put the two together and see what might be seen.

When he had arranged the meeting, he had yet walked in the shelter of the god Vashanka's arm. Now, things had changed for him and he no longer cared to serve Vashanka, the Storm God, who regulated kingship. If he could, he was going to contrive to be relieved of his various commissions and of his honour bond to Kadakithis, freed to go among the mercenaries to whom his soul belonged (since he had it back) and put together a cohort to take north and lease to the highest bidder. He wanted to wade thigh-deep in gore and guts and see if, just by chance, he might manage to find his way back through the shimmering dimensional gate beyond which the god had long ago thrust him, back into the world and into the age to which he was born.

Since he knew the chances of that were less than Kadakithis becoming Emperor of Upper and Lower Ranke, and since the god's gloss of rationality was gone from him, leaving him in the embrace of the curse, yet lingering, which he had originally become the god's suppliant to thwart, he would settle for a small mercenary corps of his own choosing, from which to begin building an army that would not be a puerile jest, as Kadakithis's forces were at present. For this he had been contacted, to this he had agreed. It remained only to see to it that Kadakithis agreed.

The mercenary who was a Hell Hound scolded the horse, who did not like its new weighted shoes or the water surging around its knees, white as its stockings. Like the horse, Kadakithis was only potential in quest of actualization; like the horse, Kadakithis feared the wrong things, and placed his trust in himself only, an untenable arrogance in horse or man, when the horse must go to battle and the man also. Tempus collected the horse up under him, shifting his weight, pulling the red-bronze beast's head in against its chest, until the combination of his guidance and the toe-weights on its hooves and the waves' kiss showed the horse what he wanted. Tempus could feel it in the stallion's gaits; he did not need to see the result: like a dancer, the sorrel lifted each leg high. Then it gave a quizzical snort as it sensed the power to be gained from such a stride: school was in session. Perhaps, despite the four white socks, the horse would suit. He lifted it with a touch and a squeeze of his knees into a canter no faster than another horse might walk. 'Good, good,' he told it, and from the beach came the pat-pat of applause.

Clouds split; sunrays danced over the wrack-strewn shore and over the bronze stallion and its rider, stripped down to plated loinguard, making a rainbow about them. Tempus looked up, landward, to where a lone eunuch clapped pink palms together from one of Prince Kadakithis's chariots. The rainbow disappeared, the clouds suppressed the sun, and in a wrap of shadow the enigmatic Hell Hound (whom the eunuch knew from his own experience to be capable of regenerating a severed limb and thus veritably eternal; and who was indubitably deadlier than all the mercenaries descended on Sanctuary like flies upon a day-old carcass) trotted the horse up the beach to where the eunuch in the chariot was waiting on solid ground.

'What are you doing here, Sissy? Where is your lord, Kada-kithis?' Tempus stopped his horse well back from the irascible pair of blacks in their traces. This eunuch was near their colour: a Wriggly. Cut young and deftly, his answer came in a sweet alto: 'Lord Marshal, most daunting of Hell Hounds, I bring you His Majesty's apologies, and true word, if you will heed it.'

The eunuch, no more than seventeen, gazed at him longingly. Kadakithis had accepted this fancy toy from Jubal, the slaver, despite the slavemaster's own brand on its high rump, and the deeper dangers implied by the identity of its fashioner. Tempus had marked it, when first he heard its lilting voice in the palace, for he had heard that voice before. Foolish, haughty, or merely pressed beyond a bedwarmer's ability to cope: no matter; this creature ofJubal's, he had long wanted. Jubal and Tempus had been making private war, the more fierce for being undeclared, since Tempus had first come to Sanctuary and seen the swaggering, masked killers Jubal kept on staff terrorizing whom they chose on the town's west side. Tempus had made those masked murderers his private game stock, the west end of Sanctuary his personal preserve, and the campaign was on. Time and again, he had dispatched them. But tactics change, and Jubal's had become too treacherous for Tempus to endure, especially now with the northern insurrection half out of its egg of rumour. He said to the parted lips awaiting his permission to speak and to the deer-soft eyes doting on his every move that the eunuch might dismount the car, prostrate itself before him, and from there deliver its message.

It did all of those, quivering with delight like a dog enraptured by the smallest attention, and said with its forehead to the sand: 'My lord, the Prince bids me say he has been detained by Certain Persons, and will be late, but means to attend you. If you were to ask me why that was, then I would have no choice but to admit to you that the three most mighty magicians, those whose names cannot be spoken, came down upon the summer palace in billows of blackest smoke and foul odours, and that the fountains ran red and the sculptures wept and cried, and frogs jumped upon my lord in his bath, all because the Hazards are afraid that you might move to free the slayer-of sorcerers called Cime before she comes to trial. Although my master assured them that you would not, that you had said nothing to him about this woman, when I left they still were not satisfied, but were shaking walls and raising shades and doing all manner ofwizardly things to demonstrate their concern.'

The eunuch fell quiet, awaiting leave to rise. For an instant there was total silence, then the sound of Tempus's slithering dismount. Then he said: 'Let us see your brand, pretty one,' and with a wiggling of its upthrust rump the eunuch hastened to obey,

It took Tempus longer than he had estimated to wrest a confession from the Wriggly, from the Ilsig who was the last of his line and at the end of his line. It did not make cries of pleasure or betrayal or agony, but accepted its destiny as good Wrigglies always did, writhing soundlessly. - '

When he let it go, though the blood was running down its legs and it saw the intestine like wet parchment caught in his fingernails, it wept with relief, promising to deliver his exhortation posthaste to Kadakithis. It kissed his hand, pressing his palm against its beardless cheek, never realizing that it was, itself, his message, or that it would be dead before the sun set.

2

Kneeling to wash his arm in the surf, he found himself singing a best-forgotten funerary dirge in the ancient argot all mercenaries leam. But his voice was gravelly and his memories were treacherous thickets full of barbs, and he stopped as soon as he realized that he sang. The eunuch would die because he remembered its voice from the workshop of despicable Kurd, the frail and filthy vivisectionist, while he had been an experimental animal therein. He remembered other things, too: he remembered the sear of the branding iron and the smell of flesh burning and the voices of two fellow guardsmen, the Hell Hounds Zaibar and Razkuli, piercing the drug-mist through holes the pain poked in his stupor. And he recalled a protracted and hurtful healing, shut away from any who might be overawed to see a man regrow a limb. Mending, he had brooded, seeking certainty, some redress fit to his grievance. But he had not been sure enough to act. Now, after hearing the eunuch's tale, he was certain. When Tempus was certain. Destiny got out its ledger.

But what to write therein? His instinct told him it was Black Jubal he wanted, not the two Hell Hounds; that Razkuli was a nonentity and Zaibar, like a raw horse, was merely in need of schooling. Those two had single-handedly arranged for Tempus's snuff to be drugged, for him to be branded, his tongue cut out, then sold off to wicked little Kurd, there to languish interminably under the knife? He could not credit it. Yet the eunuch had said - and in such straits no one lies - that though Jubal had gone to Zaibar for help in dealing with Tempus, the slave trader had known nothing of what fate the Hell Hounds had in mind for their colleague. Never mind it; Jubal's crimes were voluminous. Tempus would take him for espionage - that punishment could only be administered once. Then personal grudges must be put aside: it is unseemly to hold feuds with the dead.

But if not Jubal, then who had written Tempus's itinerary for Hell? It sounded, suspiciously, like the god's work. Since he had turned his back upon the god, things had gone from bad to worse.

And if Vashanka had not turned His face away from Tempus even while he lay helpless, the god had not stirred to rescue him (though any limb lopped off him still grew back, any wound he took healed relatively quickly, as men judge such things). No, Vashanka, his tutelary, had not hastened to aid him. The speed of Tempus's healing was always in direct proportion to the pleasure the god was taking in His servant. Vashanka's terrible rebuke had made the man wax terrible, also. Curses and unholy insults rang down from the mind of the god and up from the mind of the man who then had no tongue left with which to scream. It had taken Hanse the thief, young Shadowspawn, chancemet and hardly known, to extricate him from interminable torture. Now he owed more debt than he liked to Shadowspawn, and Shadowspawn knew more about Tempus than even that backstreeter could want to know, so that the thief's eyes slid away, sick and mistrustful, when Tempus would chance upon him in the Maze.

But even then, Tempus's break with divinity was not complete. Hopefully, he stood as Vashanka in the recreation of the Ten-Slaying and Seduction of Azyuna, thinking to propitiate the god while saving face - to no avail. Soon after, hearing that his sister, Cime, had been apprehended slaying sorcerers wantonly in their beds, he had thrown the amulet of Vashanka, which he had worn since former times, out to sea from this very shore - he had had no choice. Only so much can be borne from men, so much from gods. Zaibar, had he the wit, would have revelled in Tempus's barely hidden reaction to his news that the fearsome mage-killer was now in custody, her diamond rods locked away in the Hall of Judgement awaiting her disposition.

He growled to himself, thinking about her, her black hair winged with grey, in Sanctuary's unsegregated dungeons where any syphilitic rapist could have her at will, while he must not touch her at all, or raise hand to help her lest he start forces in motion he could not control. His break with the god stemmed from her presence in Sanctuary, as his endless wandering as Vashanka's minion had stemmed from an altercation he had over her with a mage. If he went down into the pits and took her, the god would be placated; he had no desire to reopen relations with Vashanka, who had turned His face away from His servant. If Tempus brought her out under his own aegis, he would have the entire Mageguild at his throat; he wanted no quarrel with the Adepts. He had told her not to slay them here, where he must maintain order and the letter of the law.

By the time Kadakithis arrived in that very same chariot, its braces sticky with Wriggly blood, Tempus was in a humour darker than the drying clots, fully as dark as the odd, round cloud coming fast from the northeast.

Kadakithis's noble Rankan visage was suffused with rage, so that his skin was darker than his pale hair: 'But whyt In the name of all the gods, what did the poor little creature ever do to you? You owe me a eunuch, and an explanation.' He tapped his lacquered nails on the chariot's bronze rim.

'I have a perfect replacement in mind,' smiled Tempus smoothly, 'my lord. As for why... all eunuchs are duplicitous. This one was an information conduit to Jubal. Unless you would like to invite the slaver to policy sessions and let him stand behind those ivory screens where your favourites eavesdrop as they choose, I have acted well within my prerogatives as marshal. If my name is attached to your palace security, then your palace will be secure.'

'Bastard! How dare you even imply that / should apologize to you! When will you treat me with the proper amount of respect? You tell me all eunuchs are treacherous, the very breath after offering me another one!'

'I am giving you respect. Reverence I reserve for better men than I. When you have attained that dignity, we shall both know it: you will not have to ask. Until then, either trust or discharge me.' He waited, to see if the prince would speak. Then he continued: 'As to the eunuch I offer as replacement, I want you to arrange for his training. You like Jubal's work; send to him saying yours has met with an accident and you wish to tender another into his care to be similarly instructed. Tell him you paid a lot of money for it, and you have high hopes.'

'You have such a eunuch?'

'I will have it.'

'And you expect me to conscion your sending of an agent in there - aye, to aid you - without knowing your plan, or even the specifics of the Wriggly's confession?'

'Should you know, my lord, you would have to approve, or disapprove. As it lies, you are free of onus.'

The two men regarded each other, checked hostility jumping between them like Vashanka's own lightning in the long, dangerous pause.

Kadakithis flicked his purple mantle over his shoulder. He squinted past Tempus, into the waning day. 'What kind of cloud is that?'

Tempus swung around in his saddle, then back. 'That should be our friend from Ranke.'

The prince nodded. 'Before he arrives, then, let us discuss the matter of the female prisoner Cime.'

Tempus's horse snorted and threw its head, dancing in place. 'There is nothing to discuss.'

'But... ? Why did you not come to me about it? I could have done something, previously. Now, I cannot...'

'I did not ask you. I am not asking you.' His voice was a blade on whetstone, so that Kadakithis pulled himself up straight. 'It is not for me to take a hand.'

'Your own sister? You will not intervene?'

'Believe what you will, prince. I will not sift through gossip with any man, be he prince or king.'

The prince lost hold, then, having been 'princed' too often back in Ranke, and berated the Hell Hound.

The man sat quite still upon the horse the prince had given him, garbed only in his loinguard though the day was fading, letting his gaze full of festering shadows rest in the prince's until Kadakithis trailed off, saying, '... the trouble with you is that anything they say about you could be true, so a man knows not what to believe.'

'Believe in accordance with your heart,' the voice like grinding Stone suggested, while the dark cloud came to hover over the beach.

It settled, seemingly, into the sand, and the horses shied back, necks outstretched, nostrils huge. Tempus had his sorrel up alongside the chariot team and was leaning down to take the lead-horse's bridle when an earsplitting clarion came from the cloud's translucent centre.

The Hell Hound raised his head then, and Kadakithis saw him shiver, saw his brow arch, saw a flicker of deepset eyes within their caves of bone and lid. Then again Tempus spoke to the chariot horses, who swivelled their ears towards him and took his counsel, and he let loose the lead-horse's bridle and spurred his own between Kadakithis's chariot and what came out of the cinereous cloud which had been so long descending upon them in opposition to the prevailing wind.

The man on the horse who could be seen within the cloud waved: a flash of scarlet glove, a swirl of burgundy cloak. Behind his tasselled steed he led another, and it was this second grey horse who again challenged the other stallions on the beach, its eyes full of fire. Farther back within the cloud, stonework could be seen, masonry like none in Sanctuary, a sky more blue and hills more virile than any Kadakithis knew.

The first horse, reins flapping, was emerging, nose and neck casting shadows upon solid Sanctuary sand; then its hooves scattered grains, and the whole of the beast, and its rider, and the second horse he led on a long tether, stood corporeal and motionless before the Hell Hound, while behind, the cloud whirled in upon itself and was gone with an audible 'pop'.

'Greetings, Riddler,' said the rider in burgundy and scarlet, as he doffed his helmet with its blood-dark crest to Tempus. 'I did not expect you, Abarsis. What could be so urgent?'

'I heard about the Tros horse's death, so I thought to bring you another, better auspiced, I hope. Since I was coming anyway, our friends suggested I bring what you require. I have long wanted to meet you.' Spurring his mount forward, he held out his hand. Red stallion and iron grey snaked arched necks, thrusting forth clacking teeth, wide-gaped jaws emitting squeals to go with flattened ears and rolling eyes. Above horse hostilities could be heard snatches of low wordplay, parry and riposte: '... disappointed that you could not build the temple'.'... welcome to take my place here and try. The foundations of the temple grounds are defiled, the priest in charge more corrupt than even politics warrants. I wash my hands ...''... with the warring imminent, how can you ... ?'

'Theomachy is no longer my burden.'

'That cannot be so.'

'... hear about the insurrection, or take my leave!'

'... His name is unpronounceable, and that of his empire, but I think we all shall learn it so well we will mumble it in our sleep ...'

'I don't sleep. It is a matter of the right field officers, and men young enough not to have fought upcountry the last time.'

'I am meeting some Sacred Band members here, my old team. Can you provision us?'

'Here? Well enough to get to thecapital and do it better. Let me be the first to ...'

Kadakithis, forgotten, cleared his throat.

Both men stared at the prince severely, as if a child had interrupted adults. Tempus bowed low in his saddle, arm out-swept. The rider in reds with the burnished cuirass tucked his helmet under his arm and approached the chariot, handing the second horse's tether to Tempus as he passed by.

'Abarsis, presently of Ranke,' said the dark, cultured voice of the armoured man, whose hair swung black and glossy on a young bull's neck. His line was old, one of court graces and bas-relief faces and upswept, regal eyes that were disconcertingly wise and as grey-blue as the huge horse Tempus held with some difficulty. Ignoring the squeals of just-met stallions, the man continued: 'Lord Prince, may all be well with you, with your endeavours and your holdings, eternally. I bear reaffirmation of our bond to you.' He held out a purse, fat with coin.

Tempus winced, imperceptibly, and took wraps of the grey horse's tether, drawing its head close with great care, until he could bring his fist down hard between its ears to quiet it.

'What is this? There is enough money here to raise an army!' Scowled Kadakithis, tossing the pouch lightly in his palm.

A polite and perfect smile lit the northern face, so warmly handsome, of the Rankan emissary. 'Have you not told him, then, 0 Riddler?'

'No, I thought to, but got no opportunity. Also, I am not sure whether we will raise it, or whether that is my severance pay.' He threw a leg over the sorrel's neck and slid down it, butt to horse, dropped its reins and walked away down the beach with his new Tros horse in hand. The Rankan hooked his helmet carefully on one of the saddle's silver rosettes. 'You two are not getting on, I take it. Prince Kadakithis, you must be easy with him. Treat him

as he does his horses; he needs a gentle hand.'

'He needs his comeuppance. He has become insufferable! What is this money? Has he told you I am for sale? I am not!'

'He has turned his back on his god and the god is letting him run. When he is exhausted, the god will take him back. You found him pleasant enough, previously, I would wager. He has been set upon by your own staff, men to whom he was sworn and who gave oaths to him. What do you expect? He will not rest easy until he has made that matter right.'

'What is this? My men? You mean that long unexplained absence of his? I admit he is changed. But how do you know what he would not tell me?'

A smile like sunrise lit the elegant face of the armoured man.

'The god tells me what I need to know. How would it be, for him to come running to you with tales of feuding among your ranks like a child to his father? His honour precludes it. As for the ... funds ... you hold, when we Sent him here, it was with the understanding that should he feel you would make a king, he would so inform us. This, I was told you knew.'

'In principle. But I cannot take a gift so large.'

'Take a loan, as others before you have had to do. There is no time now for courtship. To be capable of becoming a king ensures no seat of kingship, these days. A king must be more than a man, he must be a hero. It takes many men to make a hero, and special times. Opportunities approach, with the up-country insurrection and a new empire rising beyond the northern range. Were you to distinguish yourself in combat, or field an army that did, we who seek a change could rally around you publicly. You cannot do it with what you have, the Emperor has seen to that.'

'At what rate am I expected to pay back this loan?'

'Equal value, nothing more. If the prince, my lord, will have patience, I will explain all to Your Majesty's satisfaction. That, truly, is why I am come.'

'Explain away, then.'

'First, one small digression, which touches a deeper truth. You must have some idea who and what the man you call Tempus is. I am sure you have heard it from your wizards and from his enemies among the officials of the Mageguild. Let me add to that this: Where he goes, the god scatters His blessings. By the cosmological rules of state cult and kingship. He has invested this endeavour with divine sanction by his presence. Though he and the god have their differences, without him no chance remains that you might triumph. My father found that out. Even sick with his curse, he is too valuable to waste, unappreciated. If you would rather remain a princeling forever, and let the empire slide into ruin apace, just tell me and I will take word home. We will forget this matter of the kingship and this corollary matter of a small standing army, and I will release Tempus. He would as soon it, I assure you.'

'Your father? Who in the God's Eye are you?'

'Ah, my arrogance is unforgivable; I thought you would know me. We are all so full of ourselves these days, it is no wonder events have come to such a pass. 1 am Man of the God in Upper Ranke, Sole Friend to the Mercenaries, the Hero, Son of the Defender, and so forth.'

'High Priest of Vashanka.'

'In the Upper Land.'

'My family and yours thinned each other's line,' stated Kadakithis baldly, no apology, no regret in his words. Yet he looked differently upon the other, thinking they were of an age, both wielding wooden swords in shady courts while the slaughter raged, far off at the fronts.

'Unto eradication,' remarked the dark young man. 'But we did not contest, and now there is a different enemy, a common threat. It is enough.'

'And you and Tempus have never met?'

'He knew my father. And when I was ten, and my father died and our armies were disbanded, he found a home for me. Later, when I came to the god and the mercenaries' guild, I tried to see him. He would not meet with me.' He shrugged, looking over his shoulder at the man walking the blue-grey horse into blue-grey shadows falling over the blue-black sea. 'Everyone has his hero, you know. A god is not enough for a whole man; he craves a fleshly model. When he sent to me for a horse, and the god approved it, I was elated. Now, perhaps, I can do more. The horse may not have died in vain, after all.'

'I do not understand you. Priest.'

'My Lord, do not make me too holy. I am Vashanka's priest: I know many requiems and oaths, and thirty-three ways to fire a warrior's bier. They call me Stepson, in the mercenaries' guild. I would be pleased if you would call me that, and let me talk to you at greater length about a future in which your destiny and the wishes of the Storm God, our Lord, could come to be the same.'

'I am not sure I can find room in my heart for such a god; it is difficult enough to pretend to piety,' grated Kadakithis, squinting after Tempus in the dusk.

'You will, you will,' promised the priest, and dismounted from his horse to approach Tempus's ground-tied sorrel. Abarsis reached down, running his hand along the beast's white-stocking'd leg. 'Look, Prince,' he said, craning his neck up to see Kadakithis's face as his fingers tugged at the gold chain wedged in the weight-cleat on the horse's shoe. At the end of the chain, sandy but shining gold, was an amulet. 'The god wants him back.'

3

The mercenaries drifted into Sanctuary dusty from their westward trek or blue lipped from their rough sea passage and wherever they went they made hellish what before had been merely dissolute. The Maze was no longer safe for pickpocket or pander; usurer and sorcerer scuttled in haste from street to doorway, where before they had swaggered virtually unchallenged, crime lords in fear of nothing.

Now the whores walked bowlegged, dreamy-eyed, parading their new finery in the early hours of the morning while most mercenaries slept; the taverns changed shifts but feared to close their doors, lest a mercenary find that an excuse to take offence. Even so early in the day, the inns were full of brawls and the gutters full of casualties. The garrison soldiers and the Hell Hounds could not be omnipresent: wherever they were not, mercenaries took sport, and they were not in the Maze this morning.

Though Sanctuary had never been so prosperous, every guild and union and citizens' group had sent representatives to the palace at sunrise to complain.

Lastel, a.k.a. One-Thumb, could not understand why the Sanctuarites were so unhappy. Lastel was very happy: he was alive and back at the Vulgar Unicorn tending bar, and the Unicorn was making money, and money made Lastel happy, always. Being alive was something Lastel had not fully appreciated until recently, when he had spent aeons dying a subjective death in thrall to a spell he had paid to have laid upon his own person, a spell turned against him by the sons of its deceased creator, Mizraith of the Hazard class, and dispelled by he knew not whom. Though every night he expected his mysterious benefactor to sidle up to the bar and demand payment, no one ever came and said: 'Lastel, I saved you. I am the one. Now show your gratitude.' But he knew very well that someday soon, someone would. He did not let this irritation besmirch his happiness. He had got a new shipment of Caronne krrf (black, pure drug, foil stamped, a full weight of it, enough to set every mercenary in Sanctuary at the kill) and it was so good that he considered refraining from offering it on the market. Having considered, he decided to keep it all for himself, and so was very happy indeed, no matter how many fistfights broke out in the bar, or how high the sun was, these days, before he got to bed ...

Tempus, too, was happy that morning, with the magnificent Tros horse under him and signs of war all around him. Despite the hour, he saw enough rough hoplites and dour artillery fighters with their crank-bows (whose springs were plaited from women's hair) and their quarrels (barbed and poisoned) to let him know he was not dreaming: these did not bestir themselves from daydreams! The war was real to them. And any one of them could be his. He felt his troop-levy money cuddled tight against his groin, and he whistled tunelessly as the Tros horse threaded his way towards the Vulgar Unicorn. One-Thumb was not going to be happy much longer. Tempus left the Tros horse on its own recognizance, dropping the reins and telling it, 'Stay.' Anyone who thought it merely ripe for stealing would learn a lesson about the strain which is bred only in Syr from the original line ofTros's.

There were a few locals in the Unicorn, most snoring over tables along with other, bagged trash ready to be dragged out into the street.

One-Thumb was behind his bar, big shoulders slumped, washing mugs while watching everything through the bronze mirror he had had installed over his stock.

Tempus let his heels crack against the board and his armour clatter: he had dressed for this, from a box he had thought he might never again open. The wrestler's body which Lastel had built came alert, pirouetted smoothly to face him, staring unabashedly at the nearly god-sized apparition in leopard-skin mantle and helmet set with boar's tusks, wearing an antique enamelled breastplate and bearing a bow of ibex-horn morticed with a golden grip.

'What in Azyuna's twat are you?' bellowed One-Thumb, as every waking customer he had hastened to depart.

'I,' said Tempus, reaching the bar and removing his helmet so that his yarrow honey hair spilled forth, 'am Tempus. We have not chanced to meet.' He held out a hand whose wrist bore a golden bracer.

'Marshal,' acknowledged One-Thumb, carefully, his pate creasing with his frown. 'It is good to know you are on our side. But you cannot come in here ... My -'

'I am here, Lastel. While you were so inexplicably absent, I was often here, and received the courtesy of service without Charge. But now I am not here to eat or drink with those who recognize me for one who is fully as corrupt as are they themselves. There are those who know where you were, Lastel, and why -and one who broke the curse that bound you. Truly, if you had cared, you could have found out.' Twice, Tempus called One-Thumb by his true name, which no palace personage or Maze-dweller should have known enough to do.

'Marshal, let us go to my office.' Lastel fairly ramped behind his bar.

'No time, krrf-dealer. Mizraith's sons, Stefab and Marype; Markmor: those three and more were slain by the woman Cime who is in the pits awaiting sentence. I thought that you should know.'

'What are you saying? You want me to break her out? Do it yourself.'

'No one', said the Hell Hound, 'can break anyone out of the palace. I am in charge of security there. If she were to escape, I would be very busy explaining to Kadakithis what went wrong. And tonight I am having a reunion here with fifty of my old friends from the mercenaries' guild. I would not want anything to spoil it. And, too, I ask no man to take me on faith, or go where I have not been.' He grinned like the Destroyer, gesturing around. 'You had better order in extra. And half a piece ofkrrf, your courtesy to me, of course. Once you have seen my men when well in hand, you will be better able to conjecture what might happen should they get out of hand, and weigh your alternatives. Most men I solicit find it to their benefit to work in accord with me. Should you deem it so for you, we will fix a time, and discuss it.'

Not the cipher's meaning, nor the plan it shrouded, nor the threat that gave it teeth were lost on the man who did not like to be called 'Lastel' in the Maze. He bellowed: 'You are addled. You cannot do this. I cannot do that! As for krrf, I know nothing about... any ... krrf.' But the man was gone, and Lastel was trembling with rage, thinking he had been in purgatory too long; it .had eroded his nerves!

4

When the dusk cooled the Maze, Shadowspawn ducked into the Unicorn. One-Thumb was not in evidence; Two-Thumbs was behind the bar.

He sat with the wall supporting him, where the story-teller liked to sit, and watched the door, waiting for the crowd to thicken, tongues to loosen, some caravan driver to boast of his wares. The mercenaries were no boon to a thief, but dangerous playmates, like Kadakithis's palace women. He did not want to be intrigued; he was being distracted moment by moment. As a consequence, he was very careful to keep his mind on business, so that he would not come up hungry next Ilsday, when his funds, if not increased, would run out.

Shadowspawn was dark as iron and sharp like a hawk; a. cranked crossbow, loaded with cold bronze and quarrels to spare. He wore knives where a professional wears them, and sapphire and gold and crimson to draw the eye from his treasured blades.

Sanctuary had spawned him: he was hers, and he had thought nothing she did could surprise him. But when the mercenaries arrived as do clients to a strumpet's house, he had been hurt like a whore's bastard when first he learns how his mother feeds him.

It was better, now; he understood the new rules.

One rule was: get up and give them your seat. Hanse gave no one his seat. He might recall pressing business elsewhere, or see someone he just had to hasten over to greet. Tonight, he remembered nothing earlier forgotten; he saw no one he cared to bestir himself to meet. He prepared to defend his place as seven mercenf aries filled the doorway with plumes and pelts and hilts and mail, and looked his way. But they went in a group to the bar, though one, in a black mantle, with iron at chest and head and wrists, pointed directly to him like a man sighting his arrow along an outstretched arm.

The man talked to Two-Thumbs awhile, took off his helmet with its horsehair crests that seemed blood-red, and approached Hanse's table alone. A shiver coursed the thief's flesh, from the top of his black thatch to his toetips.

The mercenary reached him in a dozen swinging strides, drawing a stabbing sword as he came on. If not for the fact that the other hand held a mug, Shadowspawn would have aired iron by the time the man (or youth from his smooth, heartshaped face) spoke: 'Shadowspawn, called Hanse? I am Stepson, called Abarsis. I have been hoping to find you.' With a grin full of dazzling teeth, the mercenary put the ivory-hiked sword flat in the wet-rings on the table, and sat, both hands well in evidence. clasped under his chin.

Hanse gripped his beltknife tightly. Then the panic-flash receded, and time passed, instead of piling all its instants terri-fyingly on top of one another. Hanse knew that he was no coward, that he was plagued by flashbacks from the two times he had been tapped with the fearstick ofVashanka, but his chest was heaving, and the mercenary might see. He slumped back, for camouflage. The mercenary with the expensive taste in accoutrements could be no older than he. And yet, only a king's son could afford such a blade as that before him. He reached out hesitantly to touch its silvered guard, its garnet pommel, his gaze locked in the sell-sword's soulless pale one, his hand slipping closer and closer to the elegant sword of its own accord.

'Ah, you do like it then,' said Stepson. 'I was not sure. You will take it, I hope. It is customary in my country, when meeting a man who has performed heroically to the benefit of one's house, to give a small token.' He withdrew a silver scabbard from his belt, laid it with the sword, which Hanse put down as if burned.

'What did I ever do for you?'

'Did you not rescue the Riddler from great peril?'

'Who?' The tanned face grinned ingenuously. 'A truly brave man does not boast. I understand. Or is it a deeper thing? That -' He leaned forward; he smelled sweet like new-mown hay '- is truly what I need to know. Do you comprehend me?'

Hanse gave him an eagle's look, and shook his head slowly, his fingers flat on the table, near the magnificent sword that the mercenary Stepson had offered to give him. The Riddler? He knew no one of that name. 'Are you protecting him? There is no need, not from me. Tell me, Shadowspawn, are you and Tempus lovers?'

'Mother-!' His favourite knife leapt into his palm, unbidden. He looked at it in his own grasp in consternation, and dropped his other hand over it, and began paring his nails. Tempus! The Riddler? Hanse's eyes caressed the covetable blade. 'I helped him out, once or twice, that's all.'

'That is good,' the youth across from him approved. 'Then we will not have to fight over him. And, too, we could work a certain bargain, service for service, that would make me happy and you, I modestly estimate, a gentleman of ease for at least six months.'

'I'm listening,' said Shadowspawn, taking a chance, commending his knife to its sheath. The short sword too, he handled, fitting it in the scabbard and drawing it out, fascinated by the alert scrutiny of Abarsis the Stepson's six companions.

When he began hearing the words 'diamond rods' and 'Hall of Judgement' he waxed uneasy. But by then, he could not sec any way that he could allow himself to appear less than heroic in the pale, blue-grey eyes of Stepson. Not when the amount of money Stepson had offered hung in the balance, not when the nobly fashioned sword he had been given as if it were merely serviceable proclaimed the flashy mercenary's ability to pay that amount. But too, if he would pay that, he would pay more. Hanse was not so enthralled by the mercenaries' mystique to hasten into one's pay without some good Sanctuary barter. Watching Stepson's six formidable companions, waiting like purebred hunting dogs curried for show, he spied a certain litheness about them, an uncanny cleanliness of limb and nearness of girded hips. Close friends, these. Very close.

Abarsis's sonorous voice had ceased, waiting for Hanse's response. The disconcertingly pale eyes followed Hanse's stare, frank now, to his companions.

'Will you say yea, then, friend of the Riddler? And become my friend, also? These other friends of mine await only your willingness to embrace you as a brother.'

'I own,' Hanse muttered.

Abarsis raised one winged brow. 'So? They are members of a Sacred Band, my old one; most prized officers; heroes, every pair.' He judged Hanse's face. 'Can it be you do not have the custom, in the south? From your mien I must believe it.' His voice was liquid, like deep running water. 'These men, to me and to their chosen partners, have sworn to forsake life before honour, to stand and never retreat, to fall where they fight if need be, shoulder to shoulder. There is no more hallowed tryst than theirs. Had I a thousand such, I would rule the earth.'

'Which one is yours?' Hanse tried not to sneer, to be conversational, unshaken, but his eyes could find no comfortable place to rest, so that at last he took up the gift-sword and examined the hieratic writing on its blade.

'None. I left them, long ago, when my partner went up to heaven. Now I have hired them back, to serve a need. It is strictly a love of spirit, Hanse, that is required. And only in Sacred Bands is a mercenary asked so much.'

'Still, it's not my style.'

'You sound disappointed.'

'I am. In your offer. Pay me twice that, and I will get the items you desire. As for your friends, I don't care if you bugger them each twice daily. Just as long as it's not part of my job and no one thinks I am joining any organizations.' A swift, appreciative smile touched Abarsis. 'Twice, then. I am at your mercy'

'I stole those diamond rods once before, for Tem-, for the Riddler. He'll just give them back to her, after she does whatever it is she does for him. I had her once, and she did nothing for me that any other whore would not do.'

'You what? Ah, you do not know about them, then? Their legend, their curse?'

'Legend? Curse? I knew she was a sorceress. Tell me about it! Am I in any danger? You can forget the whole idea, about the rods. I keep shut of sorcery.'

'Hardly sorcery, no need to worry. They cannot transmit any of it. When he was young and she was a virgin, he was a prince and a fool of ideals. 1 heard it that the god is his true father, and thus she is not his sibling, but you know how legends are. As a princess, her sire looked for an advantageous marriage. An archmage of a power not seen anymore made an offer, at about the time the Riddler renounced his claim to the throne and retired to a philosopher's cave. She went to him begging aid, some way out of an unacceptable situation, and convinced him that should she be deflowered, the mage would not want her, and of all men the Riddler was the only one she trusted with the task; anyone else would despoil her. She seduced him easily, for he had loved her. all his young life and that unacceptable attraction to flesh of his flesh was part of what drove him from his primogeniture. She loved nothing but herself; some things never change. He was wise enough to know he brought destruction upon himself, but men are prone to ruin from women. In passion, he could not think clearly; when it left him he went to Vashanka's altar and threw himself upon it, consigning his fate to the god. The god took him up, and when the archmage appeared with four eyes spitting fire and four mouths breathing fearful curses, the god's aegis partly shielded him. Yet, the curse holds. He wanders eternally bringing death to whomever loves him and being spurned by whomsoever he shall love. She must offer herself for pay to any comer, take no gift of kindness on pain of showing all her awful years, incapable of giving love as she has always been. So thus, the gods, too, are barred to her, and she is truly damned.'

Hanse just stared at Stepson, whose voice had grown husky in the telling, when the mercenary left off.

'Now, will you help me? Please. He would want it to be you.'

Hanse made a sign.

' Would want it to be me?' the thief frowned. 'He does not know about this?' There came the sound of Shadowspawn's bench scraping back.

Abarsis reached out to touch the thief's shoulder, a move quick as lightning and soft as a butterfly's landing. 'One must do for a friend what the friend cannot do for himself. With such a man, opportunities of this sort come seldom. If not for him, or for your price, or for whatever you hold sacred, do this thing for me, and I will be eternally in your debt.'

A sibilant sound, part impatience, part exasperation, part irritation, came sliding down Shadowspawn's hawkish nose.

'Hanse?'

'You are going to surprise him with this deed, done? What if he has no taste for surprises? What if you are wrong, and he refrains from aiding her because he prefers her right where she is? And besides, I am staying away from him and his affairs.'

'No surprise: I will tell him once I have arranged it. I will make you one more offer: Half again the doubled fee you suggested, to ease your doubts. But that is my final bid.'

Shadowspawn squinted at the heartshaped face of Stepson. Then, without a word, he scooped up the short stabbing sword in its silver sheath, and found it a home in his belt. 'Done,' said Hanse.

'Good. Then, will you meet my companions?' The long-fingered, graceful hand of Stepson, called Abarsis, made a gesture that brought them, all smiles and manly welcomes, from their exile by the bar.

5

Kurd, the vivisectionist who had tried his skills on Tempus, was found a fair way from his adobe workshop, his gut stretched out for thirty feet before him: he had been dragged by the entrails; the hole cut in his belly to pull the intestines out was made by an expert: a mercenary had to be at fault. But there were so many mercenaries in Sanctuary, and so few friends of the vivisectionist, that the matter was not pursued. The matter of the Hell Hound Razkuli's head, however, was much more serious. Zaibar (who knew why both had died and at whose hands, and who feared for his own life) went to Kadakithis with his friend's staring eyes under one arm, sick and still tasting vomit, and told the prince how Tempus had come riding through the gates at dawn and called up to him where he was checking pass-bys in the gatehouse: 'Zaibar, I've a message for you.'

'Yo!' Zaibar had waved. 'Catch,' Tempus laughed, and threw something up to him while the grey horse reared, uttered a shrill, demonic scream, and clattered off by the time Zaibar's hand had said head: human; and his eyes had said, head: Razkuli's and then begun to fill with tears.

Kadakithis listened to his story, looking beyond him out of the window the entire time. When Zaibar had finished, the prince said, 'Well, I don't know what you expected, trying to take him down so clumsily.'

'But he said it was a message for me,' Zaibar entreated, caught his own pleading tone, scowled and straightened up.

'Then take it to heart, man. I can't allow you two to continue feuding. If it is anything other than simple feuding, I do not want to know about it. Stepson, called Abarsis, told me to expect something like this! I demand a stop to it!'

'Stepson!' Tall, lank Zaibar snarled like a man invoking a vengeful god in close fighting. 'An ex-Sacred Bander looking for glory and death with honour, in no particular order! Stepson told you? The Slaughter Priest? My lord prince, you are keeping deadly company these days! Are all the gods of the armies in Sanctuary, then, along with their familiars, the mercenary hordes? I had wanted to discuss with you what could be done to curb them-'

'Zaibar,' interrupted Kadakithis firmly. 'In the matter of gods, I hold firm: I do not believe in them. In the matter of mercenaries, let them be. You broach subjects too sensitive for your station. In the matter of Tempus, I will talk to him. You change your attitude. Now, if that is all... ?'

It was all. It was nearly the end of Zaibar the Hell Hound's entire career; he almost struck his commander-in-chief. But he refrained, though he could not utter even a civil goodbye. He went to his billet and he went into the town, and he worked wrath out of himself, as best he could. The dregs he washed away with drink, and after that he went to visit Myrtis, the whoremistress of Aphrodisia House who knew how to soothe him. And she, seeing his heart breaking and his fists shaking, asked him nothing about why he had come, after staying away so long, but took him to her breast and healed what she might of his hurts, remembering that all the protection he provided her and good he did for her, he did because of a love spell she had bought and cast on him long since. and thus she owed him at least one night to match his dreams.

6

Tempus had gone among his own kind, after he left the barracks. He had checked in at the guild hostel north of the palace, once again in leopard and bronze and iron, and he was welcome there.

Why he had kept himself from it for so long, he could not have reasoned, unless it was that without these friends of former times the camaraderie would not have been as sweet.

He went to the sideboard and got hot mulled wine from a krater, sprinkling in goat's cheese and grain, and took the posset to a corner, so the men could come to him as they would.

The problem of the eunuch was still unsolved: finding a suitable replacement was not going to be easy: there were not many eunuchs in the mercenaries' guild. The clubroom was red as dying day and dark as backlit mountains, and he felt better for having come. So, when Abarsis, high priest of Upper Ranke, left his companions and approached, but did not sit among the mercenaries Tempus had collected, he said to the nine that he would see them at the appointed time, and to the iron-clad one.

'Life to you. Stepson. Please join me.'

'Life to you, Riddler, and everlasting glory.' Cup in hand, he sipped pure water, eyes hardly darker never leaving Tempus's face. 'Is it Sanctuary that has driven you to drink?' He indicated the posset.

'The dry soul is wisest? Not at the Empire's anus, where the water is chancy. Anyway, those things I said long ago and far away: do not hold me to any of that.'

The smooth cheek of Stepson ticced. 'I must,' he murmured. 'You are the man I have emulated. All my life I have listened after word of you and collected intelligence of you and studied what you left us in legend and stone in the north. Listen: "War is sire of all and king of all, and some He has made gods and some men, some bond and some free". Or: "War is ours in common; strife is justice; all things come into being and pass away through strife". You see, I know your work, even those other names you have used. Do not make me speak them. I would work with you, 0 Sleepless One. It will be the pinnacle of my career.' He flashed Tempus a bolt of naked entreaty, then his gaze flickered away and he rushed on: 'You need me. Who else will suit? Who else here has a brand and gelding's scars? And time in the arena as a gladiator, like Jubal himself? Who could intrigue him, much less seduce him among these? And though I -'

'No.'

Abarsis dug in his belt and tossed a golden amulet on to the table. 'The god will not give you up; this was caught in the sorrel's new shoe. That teacher of mine whom you remember ...?'

'I know the man,' Tempus said grimly.

'He thinks that Sanctuary is the endpoint of existence; that those who come here are damned beyond redemption; that Sanctuary is Hell.'

'Then how is it. Stepson,' said Tempus almost kindly, 'that folk experience fleshly death here? So far as I know, I am the only soul in Sanctuary who suffers eternally, with the possible exception of my sister, who may not have a soul. Learn not to listen to what people say, priest. A man's own mistakes are load enough, without adding others'.'

'Then let me be your choice! There is no time to find some other eunuch.' He said it flatly, without bitterness, a man fielding logic. 'I can also bring you a few fighters whom you might not know and who would not dare, on their own, to approach you. My Sacred Band yearns to serve you. You dispense your favour to provincials and foreigners who barely recognize their honour! Give it to me, who craves little else ...! The prince who would be king will not expose me, but pass me on to Jubal as an untrained boy. I am a little old for it, but in Sanctuary, those niceties seem not to matter. I have increased your lot here. You owe me this opportunity.'

Tempus stirred his cooling posset with a finger. "That prince...' Changing the subject, he sighed glumly, a sound like rattling bones. 'He will never be a Great King, such as your father. Can you tell me why the god is taking such an interest?'

'The god will tell you, when you make of the Tros horse a sacrifice. Or some person. Then He will be mollified. You know the ritual. If it be a man you choose, I will gladly volunteer... Ah, you understand me, now? I do not want to frighten you ..."

'Take no thought of it.'

'Then... though I risk your displeasure, yet I say it: I love you. One night with you would be a surfeit, to work under you is my long-held dream. Let me do this, which none can do better, which no whole man can do for you at all!'

'I cede you the privilege, since you value it so; but there is no telling what Jubal's hired hawk-masks might do to the eunuch we send in there.'

'With your blessing and the god's, I am fearless. And you will be close by, busy attacking Black Jubal's fortress. While you arc arresting the slavemaster for his treasonous spying, whosoever will make good the woman's escape. I understand your thought; I have arranged for the retrieval of her weapons.' Tempus chuckled. 'I hardly know what to say.'

'Say you look kindly upon me, that I am more than a bad memory to you.'

Shaking his head, Tempus took the amulet Abarsis held out to him. 'Come then. Stepson, we will see what part of your glorious expectations we can fulfil.'

7

It was said, ever after, that the Storm God took part in the sack of the slaver's estate. Lightning crawled along the gatehouses of its defensive wall and rolled in balls through the inner court and turned the oaken gates to ash. The ground rumbled and buckled and bucked and great crumbling cracks appeared in its inner sanctum, where the slaver dallied with the glossy-haired eunuch Kadakithis had just sent up for training. It was profligate waste to make a fancy boy out of such a slave: the arena had muscled him up and time had grown him up, and to squeeze the two or three remaining years of that sort of pleasure out of him seemed to the slaver a pity. If truth be known, blood like his came so rarely to the slavepens that gelding him was a sin against future generations: had Jubal got him early on - when the cuts had been made, at nine, or ten - he would have raised him with great pains and put him to stud. But his brand and tawny skin smacked of northern mountains and high wizards' keeps where the wars had raged so savagely that no man was proud to remember what had been done there, on either side.

Eventually, he left the eunuch chained by the neck to the foot of his bed and went to see what the yelling and the shouting and the blue flashes and the quivering floorboards could possibly mean.

What he saw from his threshold he did not understand, but he came striding back, stripping off his robe as he passed by the bed, rushing to arm himself and do battle against the infernal forces of this enemy, and, it seemed, the whole of the night.

Naphtha fireballs came shooting over his walls into the courtyard; naming arrows torqued from spring-wound bows; javelins and swordplay glittered nastily, singing as they slew in soft susurrusings Jubal had hoped never to hear there.

It was eerily quiet: no shouting, not from his hawk-masks, or the adversaries; the fire crackled and the horses snorted and groaned like the men where they fell.

Jubal recollected the sinking feeling he had had in his stomach when Zaibar had confided to him that the bellows of anguish emanating from the vivisectionist's workshop were the Hell Hound Tempus's agonies, the forebodings he had endured when a group of his beleaguered sell-swords went after the man who killed those who wore the mask of Jubal's service for sport, and failed to down him.

That night, it was too late for thinking. There was time enough only for wading into the thick of battle (if he could just find it: the attack was from every side, out of darkness); hollering orders; mustering point leaders (two); and appointing replacements for the dead (three). Then he heard whoops and abysmal screams and realized that someone had let the slaves out of their pens; those who had nothing to lose bore haphazard arms, but sought only death with vengeance. Jubal, seeing wide, white rimmed eyes and murderous mouths and the new eunuch from Kadakithis's palace dancing ahead of the pack of them, started to run. The key to its collar had been in his robe; he remembered discarding it, within the eunuch's reach.

He ran in a private wash of terror, in a bubble through which other sounds hardly penetrated, but where his breathing reverberated stentorian, rasping, and his heart gonged loud in his ears. He ran looking back over his shoulder, and he saw some leopard-pelted apparition with a horn bow in hand come sliding down the gatehouse wall. He ran until he reached the stable, until he stumbled over a dead hawk-mask, and then he heard everything, cacophonously, that had been so muted before: swords rasping; panoplies rattling; bodies thudding and greaved men running; quarrels whispering bright death as they passed through the dark press; javelins ringing as they struck helm or shield suddenly limned in lurid fiery light.

Fire? Behind Jubal flame licked out of the stable windows and horses whistled their death screams.

The heat was singeing. He drew his sword and turned in a fluid motion, judging himself as he was wont to do when the crowds had been about him in applauding tiers and he must kill to live to kill another day, and do so pleasingly.

He felt the thrill of it, the immediacy of it, the joy of the arena, and as the pack of freed slaves came shouting, he picked out the prince's eunuch and reached to wrest a spear from the dead hawk-mask's grip. He hefted it, left handed, to cast, just as the man in leopard pelt and cuirass and a dozen mercenaries came between him and the slaves, cutting him off from his final refuge, the stairs to the westward wall.

Behind him, the flames seemed hotter, so that he was glad he had not stopped for armour. He threw the spear, and it rammed home in the eunuch's gut. The leopard leader came forward, alone, sword tip gesturing three times, leftward.

Was it Tempus, beneath that frightful armour? Jubal raised his own blade to his brow in acceptance, and moved to where his antagonist indicated, but the leopard leader was talking over his shoulder to his front-line mercenaries, three of whom were clustered around the downed eunuch. Then one archer came abreast of the leader, touched his leopard pelt. And that bowman kept a nocked arrow on Jubal, while the leader sheathed his sword and walked away, to join the little knot around the eunuch.

Someone had broken off the haft; Jubal heard the grunt and the snap of wood and saw the shaft discarded. Then arrows whizzed in quick succession into both his knees and beyond the shattering pain he knew nothing more.

8

Tempus knelt over Abarsis, bleeding out his life naked in the dirt. 'Get me light,' he rasped. Tossing his helmet aside, he bent down until his cheek touched Stepson's knotted, hairless belly. The whole bronze head of the spear, barbs and all, was deep in him. Under his lowest rib, the shattered haft stuck out, quivering as he breathed. The torch was brought; the better light told Tempus there was no use in cutting the spearhead loose; one flange was up under the low rib; vital fluids oozed out with the youth's blood. Out of age-old custom, Tempus laid his mouth upon the wound and sucked the blood and swallowed it, then raised his head and shook it to those who waited with a hot blade and hopeful, silent faces. 'Get him some water, no wine. And give him some air.'

They moved back and as the Sacred Bander who had been holding Abarsis's head put it down, the wounded one murmured; he coughed, and his frame shuddered, one hand clutching spasmodically at the spear. 'Rest now. Stepson. You have got your wish. You will be my sacrifice to the god.' He covered the youth's nakedness with his mantle, taking the gory hand from the broken haft, letting it fasten on his own.

Then the blue-grey eyes of Abarsis opened in a face pale with pain, and something else: 'I am not frightened, with you and the god beside me.'

Tempus put an arm under his head and gathered him up, pulling him across his lap. 'Hush, now.'

'Soon, soon,' said the paling lips. 'I did well for you. Tell me so ... that you are content. 0 Riddler, so well do I love you, I go to my god singing your praises. When I meet my father, I will tell him ... I... fought beside you.'

'Go with more than that. Stepson,' whispered Tempus, and leaned forward, and kissed him gently on the mouth, and Abarsis breathed out his soul while their lips yet touched.

9

Now, Hanse had got the rods with no difficulty, as Stepson had promised he would be able to do, citing Tempus's control of palace personnel as surety. And afterwards, the young mercenary's invitation to come and watch them fight up at Jubal's rang in his head until, to banish it, he went out to take a look.

He knew it was foolish to go, for it was foolish even to know, but he knew that he wanted to be able to say, 'Yes, I saw. It was wonderful,' the next time he saw the young mercenary, so he went very carefully and cautiously. If he were stopped, he would have all of Stepson's Sacred Band as witnesses that he had been at Jubal's, and nowhere near the palace and its Hall of Judgement.

He knew those excuses were flimsy, but he wanted to go, and he did not want to delve into why: the lure of mercenary life was heady in his nostrils; if he admitted how sweet it seemed, he might be lost. If he went, perchance he would see something not so sweet, or so intoxicating, something which would wash away all this talk of friendship and honour. So he went, and hid on the roof of a gatehouse abandoned in the confusion. Thus he saw all that transpired.

When he could in safety leave his roost, he followed the pair of grey horses bearing Tempus and the corpse ridgeward, stealing the first mount he came to that looked likely.

The sun was risen when Tempus reached the ridgetop and called out behind: 'Whoever you are, ride up,' and set about gathering branches to make a bier.

Hanse rode to the edge of the outcropping of rock on which Tempus piled wood and said: 'Well, accursed one, are you and your god replete? Stepson told me all about it.'

The man straightened up, eyes like flames, and put his hand to the small of his back: 'What do you want, Shadowspawn? A man who is respectful does not sling insults over the ears of the dead. If you are here for him, then welcome. If you are here for me, I assure you, your timing is ill.'

'I am here for him, friend. What think you, that I would come here to console you in your grief when it was his love for you that he died of? He asked me,' Hanse continued, not dismounting, 'to get these. He was going to give them to you.' He reached for the diamond rods, wrapped in hide, he had stolen.

'Stay your hand, and your feelings. Both are misplaced. Do not judge what you do not understand. As for the rods, Abarsis was mistaken as to what I wanted done with them. If you are finishing your first mercenary's commission, then give them to One-Thumb. Tell him they are for his benefactor. Then it is done. Someone of the Sacred Band will seek you out and pay you. Do not worry about that. Now, if you would honour Abarsis, dismount.' The struggle obvious in Tempus's face for control was chilling, where nothing unintentioned was ever seen. 'Otherwise, please leave now, friend, while we are yet friends. I am in no mood for living boys today.'

So Hanse slid from the horse and stalked over to the corpse stage-whispering, 'Mouth me no swill, Doomface. If this is how your friends fare, I'd as soon be relieved of the honour,' and flipped back the shroud. 'His eyes are open.' Shadowspawn reached out to close them. 'Don't. Let him see where he goes.'

They glared a time at each other above the staring corpse while a red-tailed hawk circled overhead, its shadow caressing the pale, dead face.

Then Hanse knelt stiffly, took a coin from his belt, slid it between Stepson's slightly parted lips, and murmured something low. Rising, he turned and strode to his stolen horse and scrambled clumsily astride, reining it round and away without a single backward glance.

When Tempus had the bier all made, and Abarsis arranged on it to the last glossy hair, and a spark nursed to consuming flame, he stood with clenched fists and watering eyes in the billows of smoke. And through his tears, he saw the boy's father, fighting oblivious from his car, his charioteer fallen between his legs, that time Tempus had hacked off an enemy's arm to save him from the axe it swung; he saw the witchbitch of a sorceress the king had wed in the black hills to make alliance with what could not be had by force; he saw the aftermath of that, when the wild woman's spawn was out other and every loyal general took a hand in her murder before she laid their commander out in state. He saw the boy, wizard-haired and wise, running to Tempus's chariot for a ride, grasping his neck, laughing, kissing like the northern boys had no shame to do; all this before the Great K-ing discharged his armies and retired home to peace, and Tempus rode south to Ranke, an empire hardly whelped and shaky on its prodigious feet. And Tempus saw the field he had taken against a monarch, once his liege: Masters change. He had not been there when they had got the Great King, dragged him down from his car and begun the Unending Deaths that proved the Rankans barbarians second to none. It was said by those who were there that he stood it well enough until his son was castrated before his eyes, given off to a slaver with ready collar ... When he had heard, Tempus had gone searching among the sacked towns of the north, where Ranke wrought infamy into example, legends better than sharp javelins at discouraging resistance. And he saw Abarsis in the slaver's kennel, the boy's look of horror that a man of the armies would see what had been done to him. No glimmer of joy invaded the gaunt child's face turned up to him. No eager hands outflung to their redeemer; a small, spent hero shuffled across soiled straw to meet him, slave's eyes gauging without fear just what he might expect from this man, who had once been among his father's most valued, but was now only one more Rankan enemy. Tempus remembered picking the child up in his arms, hating how little he weighed, how sharp his bones were; and that moment when Abarsis at last believed he was safe. About a boy's tears, Abarsis had sworn Tempus to secrecy. About the rest, the less said, the better. He had found him foster parents, in the rocky west by the sea temples where Tempus himself was born, and where the gods still made miracles upon occasion. He had hoped somehow the gods would heal what love could not. Now, they had done it.

He nodded, having passed recollection like poison, watching the fire burn down. Then, for the sake of the soul of Stepson, called Abarsis, and under the aegis of his flesh, Tempus humbled himself before Vashanka and came again into the service of his god.

10

Hanse, hidden below on a shelf, listening and partaking of the funeral of his own fashion, upon realizing what he was overhearing, spurred the horse out of there as if the very god whose thunderous voice he had heard were after him.

He did not stop until he reached the Vulgar Unicorn. There he shot off the horse in a dismount which was a fall disguised as a vault, slapped the beast smartly away, telling it hissingly to go home, and slipped inside with such relief as his favourite knife must feel when he sheathed it.

'One-Thumb,' Hanse called out, making for the bar, 'what is going on out there?' There had been soldierly commotion at the Common Gate.

'You haven't heard?' scoffed the night-tumed-day barman. 'Some prisoners escaped from the palace dungeon, certain articles were thieved from the Hall of Judgement, and none of the regular security officers were around to get their scoldings.'

Looking at the mirror behind the bar, Hanse saw the ugly man grin without humour. Gaze locked to mirror-gaze, Hanse drew the hide-wrapped bundle from his tunic. 'These are for you. You are supposed to give them to your benefactor.' He shrugged to the mirror.

One-Thumb turned and wiped the dishrag along the shining bar and when the rag was gone, the small bundle was gone, also. 'Now, what do you want to get involved in something like this for? You think you're moving up? You're not. Next time, when it's this sort of thing, come round the back. Or, better, don't come at all. I thought you had more sense.'

Hanse's hand smacked flat and loud upon the bar. 'I have taken enough offal for one day, cup-bearer. Now I tell you what you do, Wide-Belly: You take what I brought you and your sage counsel, and you wrap it all together, and then you squat on it!' And stiff-kneed as a roused cat, Shadowspawn stalked away, towards the door, saying over his shoulder: 'As for sense, I thought you had more.'

'I have my business to think of,' called out One-Thumb, too boldly for a whine. 'Ah, yes! So have I, so have I.'

11

Lavender and lemon dawn light bedizened the white-washed barracks' walls and coloured the palace parade grounds.

Tempus had been working all night, out at Jubal's estate where he was quartering his mercenaries away from town and Hell Hounds and Ilsig garrison personnel. He had fifty there, but twenty of them were paired members of three different Sacred Bands: Stepson's legacy to him. The twenty had convinced the thirty nonallied operatives that 'Stepsons' would be a good name for their squadron, and for the cohort it would eventually command should things go as everyone hoped.

He would keep the Sacred Band teams and spread the rest throughout the regular army, and throughout the prince's domain. They would find what clay they chose, and mould a division from it of which the spirit of Abarsis, if it were not too busy fighting theomachy's battles in heaven, could look upon with pride. The men had done Tempus proud, already, that night at

Jubal's, and thereafter; and this evening when he had turned the comer round the slave barracks the men were refitting for livestock, there it had been, a love note written in lamb's blood two cubits high on the encircling protective wall: 'War is all and king of all, and all things come into being out of strife.'

Albeit they had not got it exactly right, he had smiled, for though the world and the boyhood from out of which he had said such audacious things was gone to time. Stepson, called Abarsis, and his legacy of example and followers made Tempus think that perhaos (oh just perhaps) he, Tempus, had not been so young, or so foolish, as he had lately come to think that he had been. And , if thus the man, then his epoch, too, was freed of memory's hindsightful taint.

And the god and he were reconciled: This pushed away his curse and the shadow of distress it cast ever before him. His troubles with the prince had subsided. Zaibar had come through his test of fire and returned to stand his duty, thinking deeply, walking quietly. His courage would mend. Tempus knew his sort.

Jubal's disposition he had left to Kadakithis. He had wanted to take the famous ex-gladiator's measure in single combat, but there was no fitness in it now, since the man would never be quick on his feet, should he live to regain the use of them.

Not that the world was as ridiculously beautiful as was the arrogant summer morning which did not understand that it was a Sanctuary morning and therefore should at least be gory, garish or full of flies buzzing about his head. No, one could find a few thorns in one's path, still. There was Shadowspawn, called Hanse, exhibiting unseemly and proprietary grief over Abarsis whenever it served him, yet not taking a billet among the Stepsons that Tempus had offered. Privately, Tempus thought he might yet come to it, that he was trying to step twice into the same river. When his feet chilled enough, he would step out on to the banks of manhood. If he could sit a horse better, perhaps his pride would let him join in where now, because of that, he could only sneer.

Hanse, too, must find his own path. He was not Tempus's problem, though Tempus would gladly take on that burden should Shadowspawn ever indicate a desire to have help toting it.

His sister, Cime, however, was his problem, his alone, and the enormity of that conundrum had him casting about for any possible solution, taking pat answers up and putting them down like gods move seeds from field to field. He could kill her, rape her, deport her; he could not ignore her, forget her, or suffer along without confronting her.

That she and One-Thumb had become enamoured of one another was something he had not counted on. Such a thing had never occurred to him.

Tempus felt the god rustling around in him, the deep cavernous sensing in his most private skull that told him the deity was going to speak. Silently! he warned the god. They were uneasy with each other, yet, like two lovers after a trial separation.

We can take her, mildly, and then she will leave. You cannot tolerate her presence. Drive her off. I will help thee, spake Vashanka.

'Must you be so predictable, Pillager?' Tempus mumbled under his breath, so that Abarsis's Tros horse swivelled its ears back to eavesdrop. He slapped its neck, and told it to continue on straight and smartly. They were headed towards Lastel's modest eastside estate.

Constancy is one of My attributes, jibed the god in Tempus's head meaningfully.

'You are not getting her, 0 Ravening One. You who are never satisfied, in this one thing, will not triumph. What would we have between us to keep it clear who is whom? I cannot allow it.'

You will, said Vashanka so loud in his head that he winced in his saddle and the Tros horse broke stride, looking reproachfully about at him to see what that shift of weight could possibly be construed to mean.

Tempus stopped the horse in the middle of the cool shadowed way on that beautiful morning and sat stiffly a long while, conducting an internal battle which had no resolution.

After a time, he swung the horse back in its tracks, kicked it into a lope towards the barracks from which he had just come. Let her stay with One-Thumb, if she would. She had come between him and his god before. He was not ready to give her to the god, and he was not ready to give himself back into the hands of his curse, rip asunder what had been so laboriously patched together and at such great cost. He thought of Abarsis, and Kadakithis, and the refractory upcountry peoples, and he promised Vashanka any other woman the god should care to choose before sundown. Cime would keep, no doubt, right where she was. He would see to it that Lastel saw to her.

Abarsis's Tros horse snorted softly, as if in agreement, single-footing through Sanctuary's better streets towards the barracks. But the Tros horse could not have known that by this simple decision its rider had attained to a greater victory than in all the wars of all the empires he had ever laboured to increase. Now the Tros horse whose belly quivered between Tempus's knees as it issued a blaring trumpet to the dusty air did so not because of its rider's triumph over self and god, but out of pure high spirits, as horses always will praise a fine day dawned.