Soul of the City

THE SMALL POWERS THAT ENDURE by Lynn Abbey

Battlefield chaos reigned in what had once been Molin Torchholder's private retreat from disorder. Niko lay on the worktable while Jihan brought her healing energies to bear on one tortured joint after another. Now and again the mercenary's eyes would bulge open and the sounds of hell would explode from his mouth. The others would cease their arguings until the Froth Daughter had him quiet; then the frantic bickering would begin again.

Crit's simple statement, "We fouled up," applied to everyone in the room-none of whom were accustomed to failure on such a grand scale. Niko's physical pain was the least of their worries. The demon erupting in his moat- molded rest-place had the power to reshape all creation-if Roxane didn't do something preemptive with the Globe of Power or the mortal anarchy of the PFLS-inspired riots didn't overwhelm them all first.

None of then noticed a new shadow at the threshold.

"Divine Mother! This is intolerable!"

Shupansea, exiled Beysib Empress and, by virtue of foreign gold and the strong arms of clan Burek, de facto ruler of Sanctuary, stopped short in the open doorway. She stared- knowing that it discomfitted these drylanders, but there was no other way. Her mind, moving behind glazed, amber eyes, scanned from one shadowed comer of the room to the other, from the floor to the ceiling, absorbing every detail without the distraction of movement.

They had been arguing, singly and severally, but the sight of her united them in silence. She knew them all, except for the dark-clad, disheveled woman sitting on a low stool with a half-full goblet leaning out of her hands. Their combined presence in such a small, private room could only mean disaster.

Shupansea was caught in an undertow of emotion as the images of violence patterned themselves against her memories of the Beysa's court those last few days before her supporters in clan Burek had effected her rescue, and exile. Not even the silken touch of her familiar serpent moving between her breasts could break her horror-struck fascination with Niko's broken, blood-streaked body. The tears and shrieks of terror she had resolutely concealed from her own people could not be withheld from this insignificant drylander.

Divine Mother, she repeated, this time a prayer as the silent undertow swept her back toward incapacitating fear. Help me!

The downward surge was broken by the soft strength of Mother Bey cradling her mortal daughter. Shupansea felt her pulse quicken as the goddess' vitality flowed within her own envenomed blood. She ascended through the Aspects: Girl, Maiden, Mother and Crone, to Sisterhood, then broke through to Self-ness. She blinked and stared across the room again.

"He yet lives," the Presence said to her, and through her to the still-silent assembly. "The mortal soul survives."

Shupansea took long, gliding steps toward Niko. Tempus moved away from his self assigned post at Niko's side in a slow, graceful fury, determined to stop her. She paused and stared-seeing him clearly for the first time: this nearly supernatural man now spiritually naked and silently invoking the names of puny, man-shaped gods. She lifted a finger of Power but was spared its use when Another reached out to restrain him.

"That's the snake-bitch goddess within her," Jinan hissed, getting a handful of Tempus's biceps and squeezing it hard.

The Beysa reached out to catch a drop of Niko's blood in the curve of her long fingernail, then brought it to her lips. Blood was sacred to Mother Bey. She savored the taste of it and absorbed all it told about Niko, his rest-place, and the uneasy truce which held there. Visions of the handiwork of moat, the Bandaran imitation of divine paradise, came as an unwelcome-indeed, unimaginable-surprise.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, she, who tolerated no other deities in that portion of paradise she called her own, roared at the pantheons and protogods who shared a suddenly imperfect omniscience with her. THAT. An ephemeral finger pointed toward the blazing column that was Janni and the ominous bulge beneath it. That is what comes of giving mortals their own dreams. That is what they have built with free will: a gateway for demons-for the destruction of us all!

Mother Bey reserved special ire for her erstwhile lover, Stormbringer, but her mortal avatar was spared that confrontation. The goddess withdrew, leaving Shupansea somewhat flushed and tingling with righteous indignation.

"How could you allow this to happen?" she demanded of Molin.

Molin straightened his robe and his dignity. "You knew all that we knew. Roxane took control of Niko's body; another magician has stolen the Globe of Power. The rest, the consequences, we are only just beginning to understand."

"I have seen with my mother's eye, and the force within that young man," she gestured toward Niko with a bloodstained finger, "has nothing to do with witches! Can't you fools tell the difference between a demon and a witch?"

Tempus freed himself from Jihan's restraint. He towered over Shupansea. "We know exactly what we're dealing with, bitch," he said in a softly menacing voice.

"Well, what are we dealing with?" Shupansea replied, her head tilted back and glowering with a stare he could not hope to break. Her serpent made its way up the stiff wires of her headdress. Its tongue flickered; Tempus blinked and Molin spoke instead.

"Roxane promised the Stormchildren to the demon. She poisoned the children but she couldn't deliver their souls and got herself wounded in the bargain. We knew she was hiding; some of us thought she had a hold on Niko but we didn't guess she'd gotten behind him until it was too late and the demon'd come to collect its payment from her. That was ASkelon's message for Tempus: that she'd gotten behind him somehow."

Ischade shook her head. "It was never so simple. Roxane promised the demon a gateway in exchange for Niko. The only gateway she knew about was the Stormchildren. She thought she was safe from everything where she was-and that Niko was safe as well. Now that it's trying to take Niko, as it would have taken the Stormchildren, she's frantic herself. She understands less than we do-but, with a globe again, she has vastly more power."

"We understand the demon must be destroyed and the rest-place with it," Shupansea agreed.

Randal staggered forward, his face swollen and glistening from the fire, bits of charred canvas and flesh trailing from his clawed fingers. "Not destroyed." He had breathed the flames; his voice rasped and gurgled in his throat. "It will go someplace less defended. We need the globe. We can make it right with the globe." Passion exhausted him; he slumped forward into Jihan's outstretched arms.

"Is this true?" the Beysa demanded.

"It is likely," Jihan admitted, trying to divide her ministrations between the 'stricken mage and Niko, who moaned when her hands weren't resting against his flesh. "We can defend the rest-place, or the Stormchildren, but if Roxane has the globe she'll always be one step ahead."

"Roxane, Niko, or your son, Riddler," Ischade interrupted, focusing her own, and everyone else's, attention on Tempus. "You must make your choice. No matter what I do, I will need time. I cannot wait any longer!"

But Tempus only shook his head. He took Niko's hand and the unconscious Stepson seemed to breathe easier. "Go where you want," he said slowly.

Ischade set the goblet down and made ready to leave the room.

"Guards!" Shupansea shouted, and a pair of the shaven-pated Burek warriors appeared in the doorway. "Provide her with shoes and clothing. Escort her wherever she wishes to go-"

The necromant stared across the room, hell-dark eyes flashing rejection of Beysib hospitality.

"You ought not squander yourself by leaving the same way you arrived," the Beysa said gently, a faint smile on her lips; her eyes still defended against the power of that stare.

Ischade lowered her eyes and picked her way carefully across the shattered glass. The great black raven, which had arrived moments after the first Globe of Power had been shattered and had held itself aloof from all the commotion since, spread its wings and flapped out the window its mistress had broken by her entrance.

"How did Roxane get in there?" Tempus asked once Ischade was gone. "How? Not even the gods can violate moat's sanctuary."

"Randal?" Molin asked.

The mage pushed himself away from Jihan's healing hands. He started to speak but the words were too great an effort. Quivering, he sank back to his knees; tears ate their way down his cheeks. "They had him for a year, Riddler," he pleaded for understanding. "He hates her. He remembers and he hates her but when she comes for him.... A year, Riddler. 0 gods, after a year he remembers; he hates but he can't-won't-refuse."

Critias pounded the windowframe. "Seh!" he said, watching the smoke rising from the city's rooftops. The Nisi obscenity was somehow appropriate. If the gods, what remained of them, had intended to cripple what remained of order and competence in Sanctuary they could not have done a better job. He had even allowed the fatal thought-that the situation could not possibly get worse-to percolate through his consciousness.

"Commander," he said with a heavy sigh. "You'd better take a look at this."

Tempus followed the lines of his lieutenant's outstretched arm. He said nothing, so the others-Molin, Jihan, Shupansea, and finally Randal-crowded around the broken window.

"It's all up now." Torchholder turned away and slouched against the wall.

Jihan closed her eyes, reaching deep into her primal knowledge of all water and salt water in particular. "We've got a bit of time. With the tides they won't be able to enter the harbor until after sundown."

"I don't expect you'd be able to send them back the way they came?" Molin asked.

Shupansea tried looking, staring, and leaning perilously far out the window and saw nothing but the myopic fuzziness of the wharves and the ocean beyond it. "Send what back?" she inquired with evident irritation.

"The Rankan Empire, my lady," Tempus explained. "Come to find out what's going on in this forsaken backwater."

"How many ships?"

"Lots," the big man said with a feral grin.

The Beysa stepped back from the window, suddenly remembering that she had dismissed her guard and that none of those between herself and the door could be considered willing allies to her cause. "We must make preparations," she said, edging backward toward escape.

"You put the fear of Ranke's strong right arm into her," Crit snorted, once the nervous woman had disappeared down the narrow steps. The lone ship fighting its way through the tidal currents carried no more than two hundred men, including oarsmen, and was equipped for tribute, not combat.

"I should have killed her," Jihan muttered.

"You would never have left this room alive," Tempus informed her.

"I? I would never have left this room? I could have frozen that little bitch before she knew what happened to her."

"And what would your father have said to that?" Tempos retorted.

The Froth Daughter went red-eyed and icy for a moment. She raised a fist toward the Stepson's commander and shook it at him. Her scale armor creaked as she stomped back to the table where Niko was moaning softly. Molin peered intently out the window lest she see his smile; Crit was fighting laughter himself and nearly lost the battle when he glimpsed the priest biting his lower lip.

"I'm taking Stealth back downstairs," Stormbringer's daughter announced, effortlessly holding the grown man in her arms. "Is anyone coming with me?"

She had strength and power it was dangerous to mock, however immature its manifestation. Not even Randal, who of the men was the most clearly respectful of gods and magic, dared to answer her.

"What now?" Randal asked, easing himself onto the stool Ischade had used. Jihan's touch had cleansed and sealed the surfaces of his wounds; he had his own healing resources to call on but his continuing tremors indicated that the little mage had not yet paid the full price for the day's exertions.

With the last of the women departed, Tempus felt his confidence returning: "For you-rest. If we need you again we'll need you healthy. Go stay with Jihan and Niko if you can't finish the job yourself over at the Mageguild. Crit, you get someone in that damn house others. And get Kama-however you have to do it. The rest of us will see about restoring the appearance of order in this damn place before that ship docks."

He looked out the window again as trumpets blared from the gateways; Shupansea had evidently reached her advisors. Squads of Burek fighters, deadly swordsmen and archers despite their baggy silk pantaloons and polished scalps, were double-timing across the courtyards. Either all Beysib were nearsighted like their empress and believed the entire Rankan fleet loomed beyond the horizon, or they were taking no chances.

When the triple portrait had burned, the fire had touched Tempus-not as it had touched Randal, but purging him of the dark associations between Death's Queen, Niko, and himself. The shock, and the pain, were still strong-he'd kill the witch when he could for the crippling scars she'd left in Niko- but the compulsion he'd felt since the black storms in the capital was fading.

"Damn plague town," he said to himself. "Infecting everything it touches with its disease. Let the fish people have it."

Torchholder looked over at him. "You just. might have something there, Riddler." He liked the idea coalescing in his thoughts; unconsciously he tugged at his sleeves as a sense of competence returned to him. "Now, then-whatever we might feel about the long-term implications of Theron's delegation I think we all agree that this is not the time to have any outsider wandering around. Right?"

The other men nodded reluctant agreement.

"We also know them well enough to know that once they suspect we're hiding anything they'll make imperial nuisances out of themselves. And they're suspicious right now just from the smoke." He didn't wait for them to nod this time. "They'll want to be out there unless we give them a bloody good reason for staying exactly where we put them: plague-quarantined for their own protection."

Critias arched an eyebrow. "Priest, I could find myself liking you."

Ischade made her way to the White Foal alone. She'd separated from her Beysib escort near the Peres house when the anarchists and so-called revolutionaries had challenged them. With their twirling swords they'd seemed more than a match for the poorly-armed quartet that had come charging out of the alley and she had been grateful for the opportunity to slide into the shadows unnoticed.

The house had called out to her: her possessions, her lover, her magic, the tiny ring now on Haught's slender finger. Not long before-before her explosive journey to the palace-the call would have been irresistible. She would have had the power to sunder any wards Roxane had concocted. And she would have done just that: gone blundering into another abortive confrontation with the Nisi witch.

If the battle within Niko's rest-place had done nothing else it had vented the excess of power which had blighted her vision since Tempus had returned to Sanctuary and ordered the destruction of the Globes of Power. Purged and refreshed, she perceived the wards not simply as Haught's betrayal or Rox-ane's arrogance but as the finely strung trap that they were.

They think I am still blind to the finer workings, she'd said to the raven perched on the stone finial beside her. Their first mistake. Let's see if there are others.

No one bothered her as she picked her way across the open expanse of mud surrounding the new White Foal bridge. It was probable that none of the bravos running between Downwind and the more profitable riots uptown could see her though even she was uncertain how far her magic, or her curse, extended in such directions, now that her power had resumed its normal proportions.

Her house showed signs of her indisposition. The black roses brawled with each other, sending up bloomless canes armed with wicked thorns that flaked the rusted iron fence where they rubbed against it. And the wards? Ischade shuddered at the sight of the heavy blotches of power smeared stridently across her personal domain. With small movements of her hands, hands now less powerful but once again skilled and certain, she constrained the roses and reshaped the wards into a more acceptable pattern.

The gate swung open to greet her; the raven preceded her to the porch.

Once across the threshold, Ischade kicked the heavy-soled boots the Beysib soldier had given her into a comer where, in time, her magic would twist them into something delicate and brightly colored. She retrieved her candles, lit them, and settled into the small mountain of shimmering silk that was, in the final sense, her home.

Inhaling the familiarity-the lightness-of it, she gathered the tangled skein of imaginary silk which bound the Peres house to her and studied her options. She touched each strand gently, so gently that no one in the uptown house would suspect her interest as she reacquainted herself with what rightly belonged to her. Then she drew the thread that bound her to Straton as surely as it bound him to her.

Straton!

Ischade lived at the fringes of time, as she lived at the fringes of the greater magics practiced by the likes of Roxane or even Randal. She was older than she looked; probably older than she remembered. Straton was not the first who cut through her defenses-even her curse-to hurt her, but anguish had no sense of proportion: it was now. The Peres house, Moria, Stil-cho, even Haught; she wanted those back through pride but the sandy-haired man who hated magic had a different claim. Not love.

Partnership, perhaps-someone who, because he had shattered the walls which surrounded her, lessened the loneliness of existence at the fringes. Someone whose demands and responses were simple and who, like all the others, eventually broke the rules which were not. She'd sent Straton away for his own good and he'd come back, like all the others, with his simple, impossible demands. But, unlike the others, he hadn't died and that, the necromant realized with a shiver, might be- for want of a better word-love.

He would not die, or be stripped of his dignity, in the Peres house, if she had to destroy the world to stop it.

Walegrin paced the length of the dark, malodorous cellar. Life, specifically combat, had been much easier when he had been responsible for no more than the handful of men he personally led. Now he was a commander, forced to stay behind the lines of imminent danger coordinating the activities of the entire garrison. They said he did the job well but all he felt was a vicious burning in his gut as bad as any arrow.

"Any sign?" he shouted through the slit window to the street.

"More smoke," the lookout shouted back so Walegrin missed Thrusher's hawk-call.

The wiry little man swung himself feet first through another window, landing lightly but not before Walegrin had his knife drawn. Thrush took the arrows out of his mouth and laughed.

'Too slow, chief. Way too slow."

"Damn, Thrush-what's going on out there?"

"Nothing good. See this?" He handed the blond man one of his arrows. "That's what the piffle-shit are using. Blue fletch-ings-like the one that took Strat down up near the wall."

"So it wasn't Jubal starting all this?"

"Hell no-but they're in it now: them, piffles, fish. Stepsons-anyone with an edge or a stick. They're giving no quarter. It's startin' to bum out there, chief."

"Are we holding?"

"Holding what-" Thrusher began, only to be interrupted by the lookout and the arrival of a messenger with a scroll from the palace. "There's no territory bigger than the ground under your feet."

Walegrin read Molin's message, crumpled the paper, and stomped it into the offal. "Shit-on-a-stick," he grumbled. "It's gonna get worse-a lot worse. The palace wants plague sign posted on Wideway and the Processional; seems our visitors have arrived."

"Plague sign?" Thrusher whistled and broke his remaining arrow. "Why not just bum the whole place to the ground? Shit-where're we supposed to get paint?"

"Use charcoal, or blood. Hell, don't worry about it; I'll take care of it. I got to get out of here anyway. You find me Kama."

The little man's face blanched beneath his black beard. "Kama-she started the whole thing... taking Strat down with Jubal's arrow! There isn't a blade or arrow out there not marked for her back!"

"Yeah-well, I don't believe she did it, so you get her back to the barracks for safe-keeping. You and Cythen."

"Your orders, chief? She's probably meat by now anyway."

"She'll be alive-hiding somewhere near where we caught her that night."

"An' if she's not?"

"Then I'm wrong and she did start it. My orders, Thrush: Find her before someone else does."

Walegrin endured Thrush's disappointed sigh and watched as the little man left the same way he'd come; then he went up to the street.

Plague sign: the palace wanted plague sign to keep the visitors on the straight and narrow. It might work. It might keep the Imperials tight on their ship, away from the madness that was Sanctuary. But it would sure as hell bring panic to what was left of the law-abiding community and, the way things were going, it would probably bring plague as well.

He wrenched a burning brand out of a neighboring building and, after sending the lookout down to the cellar, headed off to the wharves. It wasn't two hours since the afternoon sky had been split by a dark apparition streaking between the Peres house and the palace. Damn witches. Damn magic. Damn every last one of them who made honest men die while they played games with gods.

Understanding came slowly to Stilcho, which was not at all surprising. There was no peace in Ischade's one-time house for understanding and a man, once he understood himself to be dead, did not reconsider the issue. Indeed, his first reaction on seeing Straton there with an arrow by his heart was considerably less than charitable. This bleeding hulk who had supplanted him in Her affections; this murder-dealing Stepson who had massacred his comrades was getting naught but what he deserved.

His opinion hardened further when the globe was spinning madness into all of them and the injured Stepson had summoned the strength to reach into that dazzling blue array of magic to disrupt it. At first, all Stilcho had seen was the globe passing from Haught to Roxane: from bad to worse; he had cursed Straton with all the latent power his hell-seeing eye possessed. He had not been gentle getting his hands under Strat's shoulders and dragging him along the hallway while Roxane gloated and Haught wore a superficial obsequiousness.

Then he saw the little things they did not: the subtle wrong-ness in the globe wrought wards, the holes through which She might be yet able to reach. He felt the pulse of fear and anticipation pounding at his temples, making his hands sweat-and that he had never expected to feel again; he even remembered, distantly, what it meant.

Haught had said She had cut him loose-had proved it- but now Haught had nothing except what Roxane had allowed and Death's Queen would surely have claimed him... if he'd been dead.

"I'm alive?"

He paused for a heartbeat's time and went immediately back to moving the Stepson, as they had ordered. What man could bear to lose such a precious gift? But he tugged more gently now; Strat, whatever he had meant with his gesture, had given him life. He pushed the kitchen door shut with his foot and wiped the spittle from the fallen man's chin.

"Kill me," Strat begged when Stilcho bent over him.

Their eyes locked. Stilcho felt himself assaulted and dragged to a level of consciousness he had never, living or dead, imagined.

Strat was going to be tortured; was going to be systematically stripped of every image his memory held. Death would spare him nothing but the pain and, for Strat, the pain would not be the true torture. Stilcho remembered his own torture at Moruth's hands. He shrank with the knowledge that no little heroics, like a slash to the carotid, would spare this man. He had never, at his best, risen above little heroics but he would now, for Straton. The determination came instantaneously and suffused the resurrected man with a glow that would have chilled the Nisi witches beyond the door-had they seen it.

"It won't work. Ace," he informed the Stepson as he contrived to make him a bit more comfortable on the floor. "Think of something else. Think of lies until you believe them. Haught can't see the truth; he can only see what you believe is the truth." He ripped a comer from Strat's blood-soaked tunic and tucked it up his sleeve. "Don't fight them; just lie."

Strat blinked and groaned. Stilcho hoped he'd understood. There wasn't time for more. The door was opening. He prayed he wouldn't have to watch.

"I said the table," Haught said in his soft, malice-laden voice.

Stilcho shrugged and thought, carefully, about being dead. But Haught had no energy for the likes of him, not with Roxane-Stilcho's empty eye saw Roxane, not Tasfalen-hovering behind him and Strat helpless at his feet.

"Find me Tempus's secrets," a man's voice with strange, menacing inflections commanded. "If they hide the son from me, I'll have the father."

The witch produced the globe from wherever she had hidden it. Stilcho clutched his sleeve where the bloody cloth was hidden and backed toward the door. They didn't notice him leaving-or perhaps they did. They were laughing, a laughter that rose in pitch until it blended with the maniacal whine of the globe itself. But they didn't call him back as he edged around the newel-post and slunk upstairs.

It was not difficult to find Moria. She had only gotten to her bedroom doorway before succumbing to the horror around her. Stilcho found her with her arms wrapped around her ankles and her Rankan-gold hair spilling past her knees onto the floor.

"Moria!"

She lifted her head to look at him-blankly at first, then wide-eyed. Her breath sucked in and held, ready to scream if he came any closer.

"Moria, snap out of it," he demanded in an urgent whisper.

Her scream was nothing more than a series of mewling squeaks as she scuttled away from him. She froze, except for her eyes, when her spine butted into the wainscoting. Stilcho, no stranger to utter terror himself, felt pity for her but had no time to give in to it. Grabbing her wrist he hauled her, one-handed, to her feet and slapped her hard when the mewling threatened to become something louder.

"For godssakes get control of yourself-if you want to live through this at all." He shook her hard and she went silent, but alert, in his arms. "Where's a window that overlooks the street?" He had never willingly come to the uptown house, never wanted to remember the times that he had.

Moria pulled back from him. Her bodice, much torn and retied, fell down from her shoulders. She did not seem to notice but Stilcho, with death still in his nostrils and hell itself downstairs in the kitchen, knew beyond all doubt that he was as alive as he had ever been.

"Moria, help me." He took her arm again. Haught hadn't slighted her with his magic: tear-streaked and disheveled she retained her beauty. 0 gods, he wanted to go on living.

"You're ... you're-" She put a hand out to touch the good side of his face.

"A window," he repeated even after she fell against him, burying her face in a shirt that had seen better days. "Moria, a window-if we're going to help him and save ourselves."

She pointed at the window beyond her bed and sank back to the floor when he left her to fight, oh so silently, with its casement.

Stilcho panicked for a second when the salt-rusted window swung wide open. Not from the noise, because Strat screamed then, but from the wards he could see shimmering like whorehouse silks flush against the outer walls. He forgot to breathe until his heart pounded and his vision blurred, but it seemed the wards were for larger forces and were not affected by the iron-and-glass casement.

The horse was still out there: Strat's bay horse that Ischade had painstakingly restored to life. It danced away from the fires burning beyond the wards and the occasional bravo racing down the street but it had no intention of abandoning its vigil-not even when Stilcho reached out to it as he had learned to reach for all of Ischade's creations. Eyes that were red, vengeful, and not at all equine regarded him for a moment, then turned away.

Stilcho stepped back from the window, smiling. He retained the ability to see the workings of magic but magic no longer took notice of him. It was a very small price to pay for the ordinary sensations returning to him. Moreover, it was one he had anticipated. He grabbed a handful of rumpled linen from the bed and had begun tearing it into strips before he noticed Moria huddled on the floor.

"Get dressed."

She stood up, examining the tangled ribbons of her bodice. Heaving an exasperated sigh, Stilcho dropped the sheets and gripped her wrists. The soft flesh of her breasts rested against his hands.

"Gods, Moria-your clothes, Maria's clothes! You can't get out of here dressed like that."

Moria's face lost its complete vacantness as the idea penetrated through her terror that Stilcho-living, breathing Stilcho-would somehow get her out of here. She yanked the ribbons free, tearing the dress and its memories from her, diving into the ornate chests where, beneath the courtesan's trappings which Ischade had endowed her with, her stained and tattered street clothes remained.

She made a fair amount of noise in her industry, hurling unwanted lace and satin to the floor behind her, but between the globe's whine and Strat's screams it was doubtful that anyone in the kitchen heard or cared about the commotion upstairs. Stilcho finished ripping the linen.

Blood would draw the bay horse. Stilcho pulled the bloody rag from his sleeve and tied it to the linen. He'd used blood to bring the dead across water into the upper town. Strat's blood would bring the horse into conflict with the wards, chipping away at the flaws in them.

"What are you doing?" Moria demanded, forcing the last of the rounded, Rankan contours into a now snug Ilsigi tunic.

"Making a blood lure," he replied, lowering the makeshift rope and swinging the dull red knot at its end toward the horse.

She bounded across the room. "No. No!" she protested, struggling to take the cloth from him. "They'll see; they'll know. We can get out across the roof."

Stilcho held her off with one arm and went back to swinging the lure. "Wards," he muttered. He had the bay's attention now. Its eyes, in his other vision, were brighter; its coat rippled with crimson anger.

But wards and warding had no meaning to Moria, though she was one of Ischade's. She rammed stiff fingers into his gut and made a lunge for freedom. It was all he could go to grab her around the waist, keeping her barely inside the house. The linen slipped from his hands and fluttered to the street below. Moria whimpered; he pressed her face against his chest to muffle the sound. Ward-fire, invisible to her but excruciating nonetheless, dazzled her hands and forearms.

"We're trapped!" she gasped. "Trapped!"

Hysteria rose in her face again. He grabbed her wrists, knowing the pain would shock her into silence.

"That's Strat down there. Straton! They'll come for him. The horse will bring them, Moria. Ischade, Tempus: they'll all come for him-and us."

"No, no," she repeated, her eyes white all around. "Not Her. Not Her-"

Stilcho hesitated. He remembered that fear; that all-consuming fear he felt of Ischade, of Haught, of everything that had had power over him-but he'd forgotten it as well. Death had burned the fear out of him. He felt danger, desperation, and the latent death that pervaded this house and this afternoon-but bowel numbing fear no longer had a claim on him.

"I'm going to save Strat-hide him until they come for him. I'm going to save me, too. I'm lucky today, Moria: I'm alive and I'm lucky. Even without the horse...."

But he wasn't without the bay horse. The bloody rag had landed on the carved stone steps that had been, many years ago, the Peres family's pride. The bay pounded on the steps, surrounded but unaffected by ward-fire. It scented Strat's blood soaking into the wood planks of the lower hallway and heard his anguish. Trumpeting a loyalty that transcended life and death, it reared, flailing at the ephemeral flames which engulfed it. Stilcho watched as the mortal image of the horse vanished and the other one became a black void.

"Moria, the back stairs, the servant's stairs to the kitchen, where are they? It's only a matter of time."

Candlelight flickered over Ischade's dark-clad body. She had collapsed backwards into her silken lair. Her hair made tangled webs around her face and shoulders. One arm arced around her head, the other fell limply across her waist; both were marked with dark gashes where the priest's glass had cut her. Ischade had death magic, not healing.

She was, if not oblivious to her exhausted body, unmindful of it. If her efforts were successful there would be time enough for rest and recovery. She continued manipulating the bonds which made all she had ever owned a focus for her power. She set resonances at each flawed boundary, reinforced them as motes of warding eroded away and tried not to feel the tremors that were Straton.

It was not her way to move with such delicate precision- but it was the only way she had left. Balancing her power through every focal object within the Peres house which could contain it, she hoped to build her presence until she could pull from all directions and burst the warding sphere Roxane had created. She had discarded the thread tying her to the bay horse. She had never regarded the creature as hers but only as a gift, a rare gift, to her lover. Thus the moment when it had scented Strat's blood passed unnoticed but the instant when it penetrated the wards was seared into her awareness.

Her first response was a heartfelt curse for whatever was causing havoc in her neat, tedious work. The curse soared and circled the wards until Ischade understood she had an ally within the house. She examined the small skein of living and dead within whom she had a focus and found that one, Stilcho, was no longer anchored. Stilcho, whom Haught had stolen and fate had set to living freedom.

Smiling, she pushed her imperceptible awareness past the ward-consuming emptiness.

"Haught," she whispered, weaving into his mind. "Remember your father. Remember Wizardwall. Remember slavery. Remember the feel of the globe in your hands before she stole it from you. She does not love you, Haught. Does not love your fine Nisi face while she wears a Rankan one. Does not love your aptness while she is trapped in a body that has none. Oh, remember, Haught; remember every time you look on that face."

The ambitious mind of the ex-slave, ex-dancer, ex-apprentice shivered when Ischade touched it. Foolish child-he had believed she would not look for him again and had taken none-of the simple steps to ensure that she could not. She sealed her hypnotic surgery with a gentle caress on the ring he wore: the ring he had thought to use against her.

Ischade retreated, then, behind the little statues, the gewgaws and the sharp knives she had scattered throughout the house. Her thoughts would eat at a mind already disposed to treason just as the essence of the bay horse ate the ward fire. It was only a matter of time.

"You have to eat. Magic can't do everything."

Randal opened his mouth to agree and received a great wooden spoonful of Jihan's latest aromatic posset. His eyes bulged, his ears reddened, and he wanted nothing more than to spit the godsawful curdled lump to the floor. But the Froth Daughter was watching him and he dared do nothing but swallow it in one horrendous gulp. His hands were immobilized in gauze slings, suspended in oval buckets filled with a salted solution of the Froth Daughter's devising. His own magical resources were insufficient to guide the spoon to his mouth- if he had been so inclined in the first place.

He had been to the Mageguild and found his treatment there even less pleasant. Get rid of the globe; get rid of the demon; get rid of the witches, his colleagues had told him-and don't come home again until you do. So he'd come back to the palace to be tended by Jinan and to fret over the way fate was unfolding for him.

"You tried," Jihan assured him, setting the bowl aside. "You did your best."

"I failed. I knew what happened and I let her trick me. Niko would have understood; I knew that Niko would have understood why we had him down here. But I listened to her instead." He shook his head in misery; a lock of hair fell down to cover his eyes. Jihan leaned forward to brush it back, moving carefully to avoid the shiny, less severe bums on his face or the singed, almost bald, portion of his scalp that still smelled of the fire.

"We've all made more than our share of mistakes in this," Tempus commiserated from the doorway. He unfastened his cloak, letting it drop to the floor as he strode across the room. The hypocaust fires had been banked for two days but the room was still the warmest, by far, in the palace. "How is he?" he asked when he stood beside Niko.

The young man's body showed few traces of his ordeal. The swellings and bruises had all but disappeared; his face, in sleep, was serene and almost smiling.

"Better than he should be," Jihan said sadly. She laid her hand lightly on Niko's forehead. The half-smile vanished and the hell-haunted mercenary strained against the leather straps binding him to the pallet. "The demon has his body completely now and heals as it wishes," she acknowledged, lifting her hand. Niko, or his body, quieted.

"You're sure?"

She shrugged, reached for Niko again, then restrained that impulse by gripping Tempus's arm instead. "As sure as I am of anything where he's concerned."

"Riddler?" The hazel eyes flickered open but they did not focus and the voice, though it had the right timbre, was not Niko's. "Riddler, is that you?"

"Gods-no," Tempus took a step forward then hesitated. "Janni?" he whispered.

The body that contained the demon and Janni and whatever remained of Nikodemos writhed and pulled its lips back into a skull-like grin.

"The globe, Riddler. Abarsis. The globe. Break the globe!"

Its fingers splayed backwards, seeming to have no bone within them; its neck snapped from side to side with force enough to make the wooden slats jump. Tempus rushed to weave his hands through Niko's slate-gray hair, cushioning the other-world tortures with his own flesh.

"Do something for him!" he bellowed as the spasms rocked Niko's body and blood began to seep from his nose and lips.

"Do something for him!"

The demon's mocking echo erupted from somewhere in Niko's gut. Sparks sizzled along Tempus's forearm, paralyzing him. Niko's arms, no longer trembling, strained purposefully against the leather straps.

"It's going to transfer!" Randal screamed, leaping up from his chair. He gestured with bum-twisted fingers. His will called forth fire but his ruined flesh could not support it. Groaning, he sank to his knees.

"Poor little mageling," the familiar voice issuing from a shimmering blue globe chuckled with strychnine sweetness. "Let me fix that for you." A tongue of indigo flame licked out from the globe; Randal, like Tempus, was motionless.

Jihan took a deep breath that formed ice in the salt-water buckets an arm's length away. She had been patient with these mortals, abiding by their constraints, accepting their wisdom even when it contradicted everything her instincts demanded, and now that they were finally helpless she was going to do things her way.

Niko turned endless, empty eyes toward the blue sphere, asking a silent question.

"Stormbringer's Froth," Roxane replied, with the malice and disdain reserved by women for lesser women.

A frigid wind swirled through the once-warm room. No one, especially a Nisi witch or a nameless demon, spoke that way about Jihan and survived. No matter that Stormbringer had created his parthenogenic offspring from an arctic sea storm, Jihan knew an insult when she felt one. She pelted the sphere with a thick glaze of ice, then she leaned her palms on Niko's chest.

"I'm here!" she announced, bringing a howl of cold air into Niko's rest-place. "I'm here, damn you."

She rode her anger across the once-beautiful landscape of a moat-endowed mind. The dark crystal stream roiled and froze in agonized shapes. Charred trees snapped and crashed to the ground under the burden of the ice that came in her wake. She reached the meadow where the pure light of Janni guarded the gate.

"I'm going in," she told him, though she had no communion with such spirits and could not hear nor understand his reply.

The heavy door with its man-thick iron bars loomed before her. Leaving a pattern of rime on the metal, she passed beyond it to confront an eternity as vast and empty as the demon-Niko's eyes had been.

"Coward!" the Froth Daughter shrieked as nothingness, which was the essence of all demonkind, leeched her substance away. She lashed out blindly, stupidly expending herself against an enemy whose chief attribute was its absence. "Co war-"

She retreated, a ragged wisp streaming back to the frost-bound doorway, and collapsed in the meadow, her fury and her confidence equally diminished. Demonic laughter using her own stolen voice compounded her shame. In her impotence Jihan gathered shards of ice and hurled them at the gate.

"I'll be back," she told it as the ice melted into the thawing crystal stream. "You'll see."

She sniffled and wiped her eyes on a damp forearm. The ground was slick with melting ice; she slipped more than once. Pain and cold became part of her mortal vocabulary as she made her way home, never once looking back to see that the meadow was brighter or the crystal stream rushing fast and clear.

"I thought we'd lost her," Tempus admitted as he watched the Froth Daughter pick her way slowly across the hillside.

We? Do we care? Stormbringer inquired in a dangerously friendly tone.

Tempus didn't bother to turn around. He wouldn't be wherever he suddenly was without some god or another's interference; and he was no longer awed by interference. "I care- isn't that obvious? She damn near annihilated herself for me."

Your care is not enough. She is mortal now and requires something less abstract. If love is beyond you, surely you remember rape? The Father-of-Weather manifested himself before Tempus: all blood-red eyes and pans that did not become a single whole.

The man who had been Vashanka's minion shrugged his nonexistent shoulders and gave the god a critical glance. "It is an option / retain," he said defiantly.

You are a nasty little man-but I have need of you-

"No."

She is a goddess.

"No."

I'll attend to this abomination.

"You'll do that regardless-for what it did to her. The answer's still no."

I'll turn my daughter's eyes toward another.

"It's a deal."

The Stormchildren lay in state on a velvet-covered dais in the vault-ceilinged room known as the Ilsig Bedchamber. Musicians gathered in an alcove, playing the reedy, discordant melodies beloved by the Beysib and guaranteed to set Molin Torchholder's neck hairs on end. He pressed his forefingers against the bridge of his nose and sought a pleasant thought, any pleasant thought, that might make the waiting easier.

Shupansea, in a curtained alcove opposite the musicians, was equally anxious but had not the luxury of isolation. Her waiting-women swarmed around her fussing with her hair, her jewels, and the splendor of her cosa. She was the Beysa this evening-as she had not been since her cousin's execution in the summer. Her breasts had been dusted with luminous powders and gilt with gold and silver; her normally slender hips were augmented by the swaying brocade-jeweled panniers in which her personal vipers were accustomed to ride. Her thigh-length fair hair had been supported and wired until it hung about her like a cloak and condemned her to look neither up nor down, nor side to side, but only straight ahead. It was a costume she had worn since childhood but now, after a season in the modest attire of the Rankan nobility, she felt awkward and feared for the outcome of the rites they were about to perform.

"You must not sweat," her aunt chided her, reminding her of the physical discipline demanded of Mother Bey's avatar.

She steeled herself and the offending perspiration ceased.

Footsteps came through the tiny doorway behind her. "You're nervous," a welcome voice consoled her as the prince reached out to take her hand.

"Our priests would have us wait until the fifth decoction has been made but we dare not. Not after this afternoon. We have countermanded the priests; it is the first time we have done so. They are anxious but we think the waiting is more dangerous than success or failure."

"Mother Bey guides you," Kadakithis assured her, squeezing the be-ringed fingers ever so gently.

Shupansea lifted her shoulders a fraction. "She says only that I must not be alone afterwards."

The prince, who had finally edged his way through her women to stand where she could see him, made a wry face. "You are never alone, Shu-sea."

She smiled and gave him a stare which proved Beysib eyes could be erotic and unsettling at the same time. "I will be alone tonight-with you."

The music changed abruptly. Before the golden-haired prince could express his surprise or pleasure he was politely, but firmly, shoved to one side.

"It is time."

The Beysa came forward onto a cloth-of-gold carpet laid between the alcove and the altar. Her first steps were tentative; she tottered between the outstretched arms of her waiting-women. Her glazed eyes held no power, only simple terror of the ancient bald priest who waited for her with a delicate glass' vial and a knife of razor-sharp obsidian.

Her beynit vipers, tasting the incense and the music, rose from the panniers to begin their own journey. Shupansea trembled involuntarily as the scales slid coldly between her thighs- for the cosa was meant for the display and convenience of the snakes, not the avatar. Three sets of fangs sank deep into sensitive skin: the beynit did not approve of her anxiety. Venom enough for the deaths of a dozen men shot into her. She gasped then relaxed as the languid strength of Mother Bey enveloped her.

She raised her arms, lifting the cosa away from her body. The serpents emerged, baring their moist fangs and their vermilion mouths. It was her priest's turn to tremble anxiously. The Beysib priest summoned Molin to the altar where, without ceremony or explanation, the ancient, bald man transferred the ritual artifacts from the old order to the new and ran from the room.

Molin held both with evident discomfort and outright fear. "What do I do?" he whispered hoarsely.

"Complete the ceremony," the voice he had last heard in Stonnbringer's swirling universe informed him from Shupan-sea's mouth. "Carefully."

Torchholder nodded. The vial contained blood from the Stormchildren, venom from the snake Niko had slain with Askelon's weapons, and ichor from Roxane's giant serpent which had been combined and distilled four times over with I powders the Beysib priests knew but had no names for. The ' scent of its vapors could kill a man; a drop of the fluid might poison an army. Molin intended to be very careful.

"The vial first," the avatar informed him. "Poured on the knife edge and offered to each of our children."

Molin remained slack-jawed and motionless.

"The snakes," Shupansea's normal voice whispered, but the Rankan priest did not begin to move. "Hold your breath," she added after a long pause.

He had once said to Randal that he did whatever had to be done, be it moving the Globe of Power or unstoppering the lethal glass teardrop. He held his breath and tried not to notice the green-tinged fumes or the sizzling sound the liquid made as it ate through the carpet and on into the granite beneath. The obsidian shook when he extended it toward the smallest of the serpents-the one with its leaf nosed head resting on the Beysa's right nipple. He was prepared to die in any number of unpleasant ways.

The beynit's tongue flicked a half-dozen or more times before it consented to add a glistening drop of venom to the sulphurous ooze already congealing on the knife edge-and it was the most decisive of the lot. His lungs strained to bursting and his vision drifting amid black motes of unconsciousness, Molin faced the avatar again.

Shupansea held her hands out palms upward. He looked down and saw the lattice work of uncountable knife-scars there. During his youthful days with the armies he had killed more times than he cared to remember, and killed women more than once as well, but he hesitated-for once unable to do what had to be done.

"Quickly!" Shupansea commanded.

But he did not move and it fell to her to grab the knife, letting its noisome edges sink deep. 0 Mother! she prayed as her blood carried its searing burden toward her heart. It was too soon. The priests had said wait for the fifth decoction; they had abandoned their offices rather than preside at her death. The serpents plunged their fangs into her breasts many times over but it would not be enough. Not even the presence of Mother Bey within her would be enough to change the malignancy Roxane had created. Clenching her fingers together, the Beysa heard the rough edge of the knife grind into bone but she felt nothing.

She fainted, although the lifelong discipline of Mother Bey's avatar was such that she did not topple to the ground. Still, she was oblivious to the agony when the imperfect decoction reached her heart and stopped it.

She did not hear the collective gasp that rose from Beysib and Rankan alike when her eyes rolled white and the three serpents stiffened to rise two-thirds of their length above her shuddering breasts.

She did not feel Molin let go of the knife or see him ignore the hissing beynit to hold her upright when even discipline faded.

She did not hear Kadakithis's enraged shout or the slapping of his sandals across the stone as he raced to take her from the priest's arms.

She experienced nothing at all until the prince's tears fell into her open eyes then she blinked and stared up at him.

"We've done it," she explained with a faint smile, letting the now-harmless knife fall from her scarred, but uncut, hands.

But barely. Shupansea lacked the strength to gather the drops of blood now welling up on her breast in a second, pristine vial; nor could she take that vial and place its contents on the lips of first Gyskouras, then Alton. Her eyes were closed while everyone else prayed that the changed blood would awaken the Stormchildren and they remained that way when the two boys began to move and a chorus of thanks rose from the assembly.

"She needs rest," the prince told the staring women around them. "Call her guards and have her carried back to her rooms."

"She is alone with All-Mother," the eldest of the women explained. "We do not interfere."

Kadakithis blinked with disbelief. "The goddess isn't going to carry her to bed, is she?" he demanded of their glass-eyed silence. "Well, dammit, then-I'll carry her."

He was a slight young man compared to any of the professional soldiers in his service, but he'd been trained in all the manly arts and lifted her weight with ease. The trailing cosa tangled in his legs, very nearly defeating him until he planted both feet on the gilt brocade and ripped the cloth from its frames. The beynit, their venom temporarily expended, slithered quickly out of his way.

"She is alone with me," he informed them all, striding out of the bedchamber with the Beysa cradled in his arms.

Molin watched as they went through the doorway-turning left for the prince's suite rather than right toward hers. He suppressed a smile as the snakes found safe harbor with the other Beysib women, not all of whom were so comfortable with a serpent spiraling under their garments as Shupansea had been.

Unimpressed by the ceremony surrounding them, the Storm-children behaved as if just awakened from their daily nap. They had already pulled the velvet hangings from the altar. Arton twisted the cloth around his head in unconscious imitation of his S'danzo mother's headgear while Gyskouras put all his efforts into wrenching the golden tassels free from its comers.

The archpriest turned to his single acolyte, Isambard, who could scarcely be expected to control the Stormchildren when they became either adventurous or cantankerous-which they were certain to do. "Isambard, go downstairs to the hypocaust room and remind Jihan that the children need her more than anyone else." The young man bowed, backed away, then scampered from the room.

Molin then turned his attention to the Beysibs in the room. The musicians he dismissed immediately, sending them on their way with only the most perfunctory of compliments. The women stared at him, defying him to give them orders as they gathered up the discarded cosa and bore it reverently from the chamber. This left him with a double-handful of priests, their foreheads still bent to the ground, who had been left to him by Mother Bey's high priest.

Ignoring the holes and the sacrilege, he paced the length of the gold carpet and back again. "I think a feast is in order: a private feast. Something delicate and easily shared: shellfish, perhaps, and such fruit as remains in the pantries. And wine- watered, I should think. It would not do to dull their appetites." He paused, waiting to see which shiny head would move first.

"You'll see to this." He pointed his finger at the most curious of the lot; with their bald skulls, bulging eyes, billowing tunics, and pantaloons, the Beysib men all looked alike to him. He seldom thought of them as individuals.

The Beysib he had addressed cleared his throat nervously and the one at the front of their triangular formation pushed himself slowly to his knees. "The priests of All-Mother Bey serve only Her transcending aspects. We... that is. You, the Regum Bey, do not serve the Avatar," he explained.

Torchholder leaned forward to grip the other man's pectoral ornament. Reversing it with a quick snap, he used the golden chain as a simple garrotte. "The Beysa will be hungry. My prince will be hungry," he said in the soft, intense voice his own people had come to fear.

"It has never been so," the Beysib protested, his face darkening as the Rankan priest hauled him to his feet.

"There is a first time for everything. This could be the first time you visit the kitchens or it could be the first time you die...." Molin gave the pectoral another quarter turn.

It was true that the Beysib could show white all around their eyes even when they were staring. The priest gasped and clung to Torchholder's wrist with both hands. "Yes, Lord Torch-holder."

The mosaic floor of the hypocaust room was hidden under icy, ankle-deep water. Isambard removed his one-and-only pair of sandals and tied them together over his shoulder before stepping into it. With his lantern held high he moved cautiously, knowing there had been snakes down here once and not knowing if the cold water would stop them.

"Most Reverend Lady Jihan?" he inquired into the darkness, addressing her as he would have addressed Molin's long-absent wife.

Silence.

"Most Reverend Lady?" he repeated, sloshing a few steps further.

They were all heaped together on the pallet where they had tied the demon possessed mercenary, Nikodemos: Jihan, Tem-pus, Randal, and possibly Nikodemos himself-Isambard couldn't be sure in this light. They weren't dead, or not all of them anyway, because someone was snoring.

"Great Vashanka-Giver of Victories; Gatherer of Souls- abide with me on Your battlefield."

Lantern rattling in his hand, the acolyte moved forward. He cleared one of the great columns that continued upward all the way to the Hall of Justice. A faint light reflected off the water- a faint blue light such as his lantern could never cast. His heart seized with panic and his gut tumbling with fear, Isambard turned around.

A column of ice loomed midway between the bodies and the far wall. Within it a blue sphere the size and height of his head throbbed; water cascaded to the floor with each rising pulse. The light grew brighter, calling to him. He walked toward it: one step, two steps, three-and put his foot down squarely on the sharpened clasp of Tempus's discarded cloak. The pain jolted him backward and backward and broke the spell.

He had left the room before he had time to scream.

Roxane had been within the Globe of Power longer than was prudent especially since her bond with life was through Tasfalen-who was dead and already beginning to ripen. With her reacquisition of a globe, the Nisi witch was powerful beyond comparison but even she could not do all the things which Sanctuary's situation required at once. She had a demon hounding her now, as well as all the other enemies she had accumulated since the first battles were fought along Wizardwall. The strain of uprooting her soul so many times was starting to show. She was getting careless-being gone so long, leaving a freshly claimed sack of bones like Tasfalen without ensuring that it was life-worthy.

Haught, who was frequently foolish but never careless, knelt beside Straton's unconscious body on the floor of the Peres house kitchen. The interrogation Haught had promised his new mistress/master was going worse than slowly. In his delirium, the Stepson made no distinctions between truth and imagination; wandering, his mind had given Haught no more than tantalizing hints about Ischade or Tempus-plus a throbbing headache.

He comprehended smaller healings like the slash on Moria's foot; he could tamper with the magic of his betters as he had when he'd exerted his control over Stilcho but he lacked the complex magical vocabulary necessary to contend directly with the inertia of a dead or mortally wounded body. He had failed with Tasfalen; the Rankan noble's body had turned a pasty shade of blue and its stiffness, when Roxane returned, would be far more serious than muscle cramps. But Tasfalen had been Haught's first attempt; he had already learned from those mistakes-and Straton was not dead.

The would-be witch studied Tasfalen's silver-white eyes. A touch from the globe and he'd have the power to mend Strat's body enough that the Stepson would no longer have his retreat into delirium and imagination. He'd unwind the man's secrets like so much silk from a cocoon and present his mistress/master with a portion of it.

Just a touch.

A piece of Haught swiped out toward the Globe of Power like a child dragging a finger through the icing on a cake. He had enough to heal and a bit to hide for the future but he hesitated. The wards were wrong: weakened, eroded, vanishing. He reached a little farther and had a vision of an equine face surrounded by ward-fire; consuming the ward-fire-

"Impudent slime! Ice water! Damn her! And you-"

The voice was Tasfalen's but the inflection was all Nisi and malice. The witch swung a clublike open hand at him, striking with the force of a Wizardwall avalanche. Haught heard his spine crack against the far wall and felt the blood streaming from his nose and mouth.

She does not love you, a nameless voice rose out of Haught's memory. Remember your/other: a wind-filled husk of flayed skin when the Wizardwall masters had finished with him. Haught shook the blood from his hand and healed as the witch ranted, cursed, and swallowed the globe.

Haught was against the cupboard where Shiey kept the knives. Silently he called one to his sleeve and held it against his forearm when he meekly rose and followed his mistress/master from the room. He said nothing about the wards or his vision.

Stilcho crept back up the stairway to the dark landing where Moria waited.

"It's now or never," he told the quiet woman, grateful he could not see her face when he found her wrist and led her back down the stairs.

There were two stairways leading to the kitchen of the Peres house: one came up from the larder and pantries in the basement, the other ascended to the servant's quarters under the eaves. Both had been occupied. Stilcho opened the door to face the malevolent leer of the household's cook, Shiey. He knew that face-the last face his missing eye had seen-and it turned his bowels to ice. His resolve and his courage vanished; Moria's hand fell from his trembling fingers.

"We're taking Straton to the stables," Moria said in a soft but firm whisper as she stepped out of Stilcho's shadow. She had her own fears of these servants whom the beggar-king Moruth had provided for the house and she had learned how to hide those fears long ago. "You and you," she pointed to the burliest pair, "take his feet." She looked up to Stilcho.

Giving the one-handed cook a lingering glower, the one-eyed man took position at the Stepson's shoulders.

"We'll get him into the lofts, if we can. And we'll wait for the help that's going to be coming-from everywhere."

"An' if'n it don't?" Shiey demanded.

"We bum the stables around us."

They grumbled but they had been listening as well; none disagreed. Moria held the outer door for the men while Shiey gave her cupboards a final inspection.

"Took my best cleaver, didn't he?" She prowled quickly through the cutlery, slipping her favorite implements through the leather loops of her belt. "Here, lady." She spun around and flipped a serrated poultry knife the length of the room. Moria felt the hardwood hilt smack into her palm before she'd consciously decided to catch the knife rather than dodge it. "Ain't nothin' can't be hurt wi' a good knife," Shiey informed her with a grin.

Walegrin shoved the trencher to one side. Whatever the barracks' cooks had thrown into the dinner pot smelled as bad as the smoke he had breathed all afternoon, and tasted worse. He had men still out in the streets-more than a dozen good men, not including Thrusher, who had yet to return from his special private assignment. Maybe the palace had good reason for wanting plague sign splashed over every other color of graffiti out there; he hoped they did. The populace was reacting with predictable panic.

He'd kept his men busy fighting but now the sun was down. A Rankan oar-barge flying Vashanka's long-absent standard had tied up at the wharf, its passengers and cargo under imaginary quarantine. No one had yet seen a disease-slain corpse; rumors were getting wilder and darker with each retelling. So far Walegrin didn't believe any of them, but some of the men were showing doubt at the edges and the night had just begun.

Before he could decide on a course of action, the door to his quarters slammed open admitting one of the veterans who'd been with him for years.

"Thrush's at the West Gate with Cythen. They've got a body between 'em an' they say they won't give it over."

"Bloody hells," the commander exclaimed, crumpling his cloak in one fist. "Watch the pot, Zump. I'll be back."

He went down the stairs at a run. He'd believed in Kama; believed in the mugs of ale she'd downed with Strat and him a scant week ago. He'd believed she hadn't put an arrow in Straton and believed she was smart and wary enough to keep herself alive after it'd happened.

The temporary palace morgue was just beyond the public gallows. It glowed faintly in the late twilight. With plague sign up the gravesmen were taking no chances and had laid a fair carpet of quicklime beneath their feet. Thrush was arguing loudly with his escort as Walegrin approached.

"As you were," he commanded, positioning himself carefully between the gravesmen and the shrouded corpse. "What's the problem?"

"It's gotta stay here," the chief digger said, pointing to the dark object behind Walegrin's feet.

Thrusher sucked on his teeth. "But, Commander, he's one of ours: Malm. He deserves the rites inside-beside the men he served with for the last time."

Malm had died two years back and had never stood high in Thrush's estimation. Walegrin peered into the darkness. His friend's face was unreadable. Still, he'd known Thrusher for thirteen years: if the little man wouldn't leave Kama's body with the gravedigger's there had to be a good reason.

"We tend our own," he told the gravesmen.

"The plague, sir. Orders: your orders."

It was easy for the straw-blond commander to lose his temper. "My man hasn't got the plague, damn you. He's got a big, bloody hole where his stomach used to be! Take him to the barracks, Thrush-now!"

Thrush and Cythen needed no urging to heave the sagging burden to their shoulders and double-time it across the parade-ground while Walegrin dueled silently with the gravediggers.

"Got to tell 'em," the gravesman said, looking away as he cocked a thumbtoward the Hall of Justice dome. "Orders're orders. Even them's that make 'em can't break 'em."

Walegrin ran a hand through the ragged hair that had escaped the bronze circlet on his brow. "Take the message to Molin Torchholder, personally then. Tell him Vashanka's rites -want performing in the barracks-plague or no plague."

The least of the diggers headed for the hall. Walegrin waited a moment, then turned back toward the barracks, quite pleased with himself. Until the gravesman threatened him, he hadn't been certain how he was going to get a message to his mentor without drawing the wrong kind of attention.

"Upstairs-Cythen's room," Zump said as soon as he'd crossed the barracks' threshold. Every one of the half-dozen men in the room was watching him. But at least they weren't thinking about plague or imperial barges. Walegrin forced himself to walk slowly as he climbed the half-flight of stairs to where Cythen, the only woman billeted with the regular garrison, slept.

Thrush and Cythen stood guard outside the open door.

"How is she?" Walegrin asked as they slid the bolt open.

"I'm fine," Kama assured him herself, swinging long, leather-clad legs off of Cythen's bed.

A dark smear covered most of the right side of her face but it seemed mostly soot. She wasn't moving like she'd taken too much punishment.

"I guess I owe you my life," she said uncomfortably.

"I didn't think you'd kill Strat. You'd had too many opportunities before-better opportunities. And you wouldn't care if he was shacked up with the witch."

She scowled. "You're right on the first, anyway."

"Piffles, Chief," Thrusher interjected from the open doorway. "Two of them guarding the cellar we found her in."

Kama stood in front of Walegrin, looking through and beyond him. She had that way about her-even dressed in scratched and rag-tied leather she had elegance and, however unconsciously, the powerful demeanor of her father. The garrison commander never had the upper hand with her.

"Personal?" he stammered.

"Personal? Personal? Gods, no. They saw me with Strat and you. They thought I'd sold out-nothing personal about that," she snapped.

Then why lock her up and put an arrow in Strat? And why Strat and not him?-he was every bit as easy to find. It was personal, all right, as personal as the sharp-faced PFLS leader could make it.

"You've got worse problems," Walegrin told her.

Finally she turned away, watching the lamp-flame as if it were the center of the universe. "Yeah, so they tell me. He used one of Jubal's arrows, didn't he? All hell broke loose, didn't it?"

Walegrin couldn't suppress a bitter laugh. "Not quite. Came close. Seems someone came out of the witch's house an' dragged .Strat back in. Stepsons thought they'd go in to rescue him. Found the place'd been warded: Nisi warded-like you'd remember, I guess. Old Critias lit back for the palace and found out that Roxane'd broken out of wherever she'd been hiding and went there 'cause some slave-apprentice of Ischade's'd stolen a Globe of Power and stashed it there. So, no, hell didn't quite break out-it's sort of holed up there in the old Peres place."

Kama ran her hands through her hair. Her shoulders sagged and when she turned around again she looked straight at Walegrin. "There's more, isn't there." She didn't make it a question.

"Yeah. There's a boat down at the wharf with Vashanka's arrows flying from its mast. They say it's Brachis at the least and maybe our new Emperor as well. Can't be sure because we've told them the town's under plague sign: no one from Sanctuary's been on board; no one's gotten off either. Whatever it is, it's got the whole damn palace fired up. They mean to have the town quiet if they have to kill every known troublemaker before sunrise-and your name's at the top of everyone's list. Word was that you didn't even have to be brought in alive."

"Crit?" she asked. "Tempus?"

Walegrin nodded after both names. "Kama, the only Stepson who might not want you dead is inside the witch's house with bigger problems than you've got. The nabobs were in trouble anyway; Strat's arrow didn't make their problems but the way it's comin' down you'd think you stole the globe and let Roxane out."

"So what am I supposed to do? Hide the rest of my life? Climb to the highest rooftop and leap to my ignominious death? Maybe I'll just go back to Zip and the rest. I can take care of that myself, at least." She began pacing, though there was barely enough space between the bed and the wall for her to take two steps before turning. "I could get on that boat. Reach Theron, if he's there-"

The garrison regulars exchanged glances. Under no circumstances was anyone who knew what had been going on in Sanctuary going anywhere near that wharf without an arm-long scroll of permissions. Walegrin took a step forward, blocking Kama's path.

"I've sent word to Molin Torchholder. I told you about him. If there's anyone in the palace who'll understand the truth of this. it's him."

Kama stared in disbelief. "Molin's coming here?"

"To perform your funerary rites. The diggers went to get him. He'll come. He might not be too popular with you Wiz-ardwall veterans but he takes care of Sanctuary. You can trust him-I told you that," Walegrin assured her, misreading the shadows that fell across Kama's face.

"How long?"

"I've sent word. He'll come as soon as he can. The Interiors," by whom he meant the few Rankan soldiers still on detail within the palace, "say there was some sort of big Beysib gathering around sunset-some sort of ritual. I don't know if he was involved or not. If he's got to eat with them he may not get here till midnight."

Kama strode to the little window overlooking the stables and a corner of the parade ground. She popped the shutters and leaned out into the night air.

"I'd just as soon you kept the windows closed and stayed out of sight," Walegrin requested, unable to give her a direct order.

An inaudible sigh ran the length of her back. She pulled the boards closed and stared expectantly at him. "I'm your prisoner, then?"

"Damn, woman-it's for your own good. No one's going to think of looking for you here-but I can't keep them out if they get a notion to look. If you've got any close friends you think you'd be safer with you just tell me about them and I'll see that you spend the night there."

Kama had pushed as hard and far as she dared-more from habit than grand design. "Is there any food left below?" she asked in a more civil voice, "or water?"

"Fish stew with fat-back; some wine. I'll send some up."

"And water, please-I'd like to wash before my funeral rites." She flashed the smile that made men forget she was deadly.

Torchholder, still garbed in the regalia he had worn when the Beysa had healed the Stormchildren, came to the garrison barracks flanked by the gravediggers. The diggers demanded to view the body but Molin, once he saw Walegrin's anxiety, dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

"Not before the rites," he snarled contemptously. "Until the spirit is sanctified and released, the impure may not view the remains."

"Ain't no 'Shankan funeral I've ever heard of," the second of the gravediggers complained to his superior.

"The man was an initiate into Vashanka's Brotherhood. Would you risk the Stormgod's wrath?"

The gravediggers, like everyone else in Sanctuary, suspected that the Stormgod was impotent or vanquished but none of the trio was about to say so to a palace nobleman whose power in the simple matters of life and death was not in question. They agreed to return to their posts and await the delivery of the body. Molin watched the door close behind them, then pulled Walegrin back into the shadows.

"What in seven hells is going on here?"

"There's a bit of a problem," the younger man explained, drawing the priest up the stairs. "Someone you should talk to."

"Who've you got-?" Molin demanded as Walegrin knocked once, then shoved the door open.

Kama had put her time and the water to good use. The soot and grime were gone from her leathers and her face; her hair framed her face in a smooth, ebony curtain. Walegrin saw something he did not immediately understand pass silently between them.

"Kama," Torchholder said softly, refusing for the moment to cross the threshold. Throughout the afternoon and into the evening he had forced any thought of her from his mind; had, in effect, abandoned her to fate. He believed she would not have expected, or appreciated, anything else and saw by her face that he had believed correctly-but correctness did nothing to alleviate the backlash of self-imposed guilt which swept up around him.

"Shall I leave?" Walegrin asked, piecing the situation together finally.

Molin started; weighed a dozen responses and their probable consequences in his mind, and said: "No, stay here," before anyone could guess he had considered some other course of action. "Kama, why are you here, of all places?" he asked, closing the door behind him.

With Walegrin's help, she explained her situation. How the PFLS leader. Zip, had misinterpreted her encounter with Stra-ton and Walegrin and how that mistake had started the downward spiral of events which culminated with not merely the attempt on the Stepson's life but the sabotage of all he had tried to accomplish.

Molin, though he listened attentively, took a few moments to congratulate himself. Had he dismissed Walegrin, he would have helped Kama because he loved her-and, in time, she would have rejected him for it. Now, he could help her because he had heard and believed her story before witnesses. She might still reject him-she would always prefer action to intrigue, he suspected-but it wouldn't be through the weakness called love.

"You have two choices, Kama," he explained when both she and Walegrin were silent. "No one would be surprised if you had died today. I could easily see to it that everyone believed that you had. You could take a horse from the stables and no one would ever think to come looking for you." He paused. "Or you can clear your name."

"I want my name," she replied without hesitation. "I'll appeal to the Emperor's justice...." It was her turn to pause and calculate options. "Brachis-" She looked around the room and remembered the Stormchildren, the witches, and the ir-remedial absence of Vashanka. "I'll get the truth out of Zip," she concluded.

Molin shook his head and turned to Walegrin. "Would you believe anything that young man told you?"

Walegrin shook his head.

"No, Kama, maybe if Strat's still alive in there and he says it wasn't you, you'd be believed, but no one else's word will count for enough. You'll do best coming in to face your accusers."

"Under your protection?"

"Under Tempus's protection."

Walegrin broke into the conversation: "He's one of the ones who've ordered her dead!"

"He ordered her captured-the rest is the enthusiasm of his subordinates. He's got caught in another skirmish with the demon-and Roxane:-for Niko's soul. Jihan barely pulled him out and she is, until the next sea storm at any rate, as mortal as you or I. Tempus is in no mood for death right now."

"You're wrong if you think he'd go lightly with me," Kama warned in a low voice. "He acknowledges my existence- nothing more than that. It would be easier for him if I did die."

It cost her to admit that to anyone, stranger or lover. Molin knew better than to deny it. "I'm not interested in making things easier for that man," he said in his own low, measured voice. "He will not dare to judge you himself, so he will be scrupulously honest in seeing that justice is done by someone else."

Kama tossed her hair behind her shoulders. "Let's go to him now."

"Tomorrow," Molin averred. "He has other obligations tonight."

Prince Kadakithis took the tray from the Beysib priest. He was gracious, but firm: no one besides himself was attending Shupansea. It was her wish; it was his wish; and it was time everyone got used to the idea that he gave orders too. The bald priest had seen too much upheaval in one day to argue successfully. He bowed, gave his blessing, and backed out of the antechamber. The prince set the careful arrangement of chilled morsels beside the bed and returned his attention to the Beysa.

Streaks of opalescent powder shot across the bleached white imperial bedlinen. Brushing aside a blue-green swirl, Kadak-ithis resumed his vigil, waiting for her eyes to open and more than half-expecting that he'd made a terrible mistake. He smoothed her hair across the pillows; smiled; dared to kiss her breasts lightly as he'd never dared to do at any of the few other times they'd stolen moments alone together and jerked upright when he felt something move against the back of his neck.

The Beysa ran orchid-colored fingertips down his forearm. "We are alone, aren't we?" she inquired.

"Quite," he agreed. "They've sent food up for us. Are you hungry?"

He reached for the dinner-tray and found himself restrained. Shupansea raised herself up and began dealing with the clasps on his tunic.

"Kith-us, I have two half-grown children and you have had a wife and concubines since you were fourteen. I surrendered my virginity in a ritual that was witnessed by at least forty priests and relations-tell me the first time wasn't just as bad for you."

The prince blushed crimson.

"Very well, then. We're pawns. The cheapest whore has more freedom than I've had. But everything's in flux now. Even Mother Bey is affected. She says not to be alone tonight; I don't think she can absorb your stormgod into herself as She has done with all our heroes and man-gods. I could choose to be with a priest or one of the Burek but I've chosen to be with you."

She stripped the loose tunic back from the prince's shoulders and pulled him toward her. He resisted, fumbling with the accursed buckles on his sandals, then committed himself to the changes she promised.

It was night at last, with the darker emotions of the mortal spirit obscuring the heavens as surely as the smoke and the eternal fog. Ischade extinguished her candles and gathered her dark robes around her. She had planned and deliberated as she had seldom done, choosing decision over reaction despite its risks and unfamiliarity.

She sealed the White Foal house with a delicate touch; if she failed, the dawn would find nothing more than rotting boards rising from the overgrown marshes. The black roses opened as she passed them, giving her their arcane beauty for what might be the last time. With a caress she savored their death-sweet perfume and sent them back where she had found them.

Across the bridge, deep within the better part of town, the bay horse consumed the last of the ward-fire, leaving the Peres house naked to whatever moved in the darkness. Ischade clung to the shadows with more than her usual caution; she was not immune to mortal forms of death and there were others migrating instinctively to the house now that its defenses had vanished. Crouched in a doorway, she lit a single candle and studied the wisps of magic rising through the ruins of Roxane's wards.

At her unspoken command the front door faded from its hinges. Ischade crept through, bristling with alertness and prepared to utilize every trick in her carefully prepared arsenal. There was nothing to challenge or greet her as she glided along the hallway, vanishing amid her numerous possessions.

She found the trail Straton's blood had made and followed it through to the kitchen. Stilcho's heroism had borne fruit; but Straton's safety was not her only goal. Haught was here; the Nisi witch was here and she would not leave until she had consigned both to hell and beyond.

Continuing her search, Ischade swept from room to room to the waist-thick beams of the cluttered attic where her search had to end. Haught crouched outside the sphere, enraptured by the nether-world dazzle of the globe, his eyes as wide and glazed as any Beysib's. Shiey's cleaver lay in a twisted lump at his feet. Tasfalen sang with a dead man's voice, dragging one leg stiffly as he shambled around the perimeter of the globe's light.

Tasfalen?

Ischade did not immediately comprehend the changes which had overtaken Tasfalen Lancothis. Had Haught somehow kept the globe? Had she simply imagined Roxane's taint on the corroded wards? Surely Tasfalen's flawed resurrection had been her one-time apprentice's work; Roxane's efforts were brutal but never so crude. Concealed by shadow and the skein of magic she had spun, the necromant dared briefly to listen to the globe's song until she could piece the truth together.

She noted, even as Haught had noted, the carelessness which marked the Nisi witch's failure to protect her mortal shell and recognized the same mystic illness from which she herself had only just recovered. For a fleeting moment Ischade felt a sense of pity that one so powerful should be conquered by an accumulation of minute errors. Then she set about weaving a gossamer web to ground the globe's radiant energy in her focal possessions as fast as Roxane/Tasfalen could create it.

The faster the globe whirled, the stronger Ischade's binding threads became, until the whole house rattled and dust fell in flakes from the ancient roofbeams-and still the Nisi witch sang her curses into the artifact. The necromancer played out the last strand and stood up in the wash of blue light.

Tasfalen's dead eye gave no indication of recognition; Rox-ane was too deeply enmeshed in her spell-casting to spare the energy for simple words. A shriek of rage emanated from the globe itself as the Nisi witch launched her attack-a shriek that shattered abruptly as the power surged into Ischade's handiwork and made the web brilliantly visible. Curls of smoke twisted up from the weaker foci, but the web held. Ischade began to laugh, savoring her counterpart's growing terror.

Roxane flailed helplessly with Tasfalen's rigor-stricken arms, struggling to free herself from the power gnawing at her soul.

"The wards!" Roxane's disembodied voice howled above the globe's whine. "No wards! He comes for me!"

The Globe of Power spun faster, first swallowing the witch's voice, then swallowing her body within its cobalt sphere. Gouts of fire sprang up in the joists and floorboards where Ischade's web had touched them. Ischade covered her hair with her cloak as she inched away from the conflagration swirling around the globe. The Nisi witch was trapped, along with her accursed artifact; it was time to see that Straton was safely away from the house and its outbuildings. Straton-she put his face in the forefront of her mind and looked toward the comer where the stairs had been.

An orange nimbus surrounded the image Ischade formed of her lover. A demonic nimbus, she realized too late-after she had turned to face the throbbing cobalt sphere again. No wards, Roxane had screamed: no wards to keep Niko's demon at bay. It had one soul but it could claim many. Her foot scuffed against the rough planks, but Ischade moved forward as it beckoned.

"Straton."

Haught kept himself small and low against the roofbeams. Insignificant-as he had always been as a dancer or a slave; beneath the notice of witches and, certainly, of demons. He saw the thing which had been Roxane flickering between an awful emptiness and the dozen or more bodies the witch had taken during her life. He saw Ischade think to escape-and fail, and lurch inescapably forward. But mostly he saw the globe hanging midway between Ischade and the demon: motionless and, for the moment, ignored.

Still keeping himself invisible in the demon's perception, he drew himself into a compact crouch. There was no need for the globe to be destroyed by this, he thought while massaging the finger which bore Ischade's ring. One leap would take him across the sphere and down the stairs. He was a dancer still, in his body; the leap was no great feat for him.

He caught the skull-sized artifact on the tips of his fingers. The momentum of his leap brought the searing object hard against his breast as he forced the center of a very small universe to shift from one existence through an infinity of others. It clung to him; passed through him; absorbed him; shattered and expelled him utterly.

Ischade was hurled against the rafters by the force of the globe's destruction. Wrapped in the fullness of her fire-magic she barely reached the stairway when the roof itself was swallowed in the flames. Her robes were in flames before she reached the streets.

A tower of fire soared from the open roof of the Peres house to the heavens themselves. The demon, trapped in fire, warred with Stormbringer, whose thundercloud form was illuminated by each lightning-bolt He threw. A crowd was gathering, a crowd which saw her try to squeeze the flames from her hair and robes and called after her when she raced down the streets with fire still licking after her.

Molin Torchholder had been one of the first to climb to the palace rooftops for a clearer view of the flame pillar. Bracing himself against the gritty wind he looked past the light to the dark cloud beyond.

"Stormbringer?"

He nearly fell from the roof as a hand closed tightly over his shoulder. "Not tonight," Tempus said with a laugh.

There were others appearing at the myriad stairways, making their way to the railing circling the Hall of Justice: Jihan and Randal, leaning on each other for strength, with Niko close behind; Isambard, dragged forward by the exuberant Storm-children; the functionaries, retainers, and day-servants all barefoot and in their nightclothes. The palace was no different than the rest of Sanctuary this night-every rooftop, courtyard, and clearing had its collection of awestruck mortals.

Brilliant light streamed into the prince's bedroom. He awoke, sighing with the knowledge that the best must also seem the shortest, and meant to leave Shupansea undisturbed. His heart sank when he realized he was alone in the bed; it did not rise when he saw her transfixed by the column of light in the open window.

Dragging a silken blanket behind him, he came slowly to join her.

"She has kept her promises," Shupansea explained, taking a comer of the blanket around her shoulder and pressing close against him. "Stormbringer fights the demon."

It did not seem like gods and demons at first glance. It seemed like a single, great cloud spewing lightning at a flame of impossible size and brightness-but such a vision was, in itself, so improbable that the Beysa's explanation was as acceptable as any other. Certainly the lightning struck only the flame and the flame directed spirals of its substance at the cloud. The stormcloud, with its percussive thunder, deflected the fire away from itself to the ocean and, occasionally, the city.

"He has it trapped," the Beysa said, indicating the precision with which the Stormgod's bolts prevented the demon-fire from shifting its location. "They will fight until the demon accepts annihilation."

The prince was unable to look away from the awesome spectacle. Armed with Shupansea's explanations he could see the flame shrinking each time it launched a missile against the lightning. He stayed Shupansea's hand when she tried to close the shutters.

"The end is inevitable," she assured him, holding him tightly.

A fine powder blew through the window. The Beysa protected herself but tears flowed freely from Kadakithis's eyes.

"I want to see if there's a beginning as well."

"The beginning is here," she reminded him, closing the .shutters and leading him back to the bed.