On his hands and knees in blood and shit. Zip was thinking that this was probably it-the death he'd earned, in circumstances he'd dreamed too often. He waited to see if it was a blade from behind that would do the talking.
A sandal splashed in the blood by his hand; Sync's Rankan-accented voice said, "That's right, talk. If your man here had talked before he acted, he'd be alive now." A gloved hand reached down for him; above it, a bracer with the 3rd's unit device of a rearing horse with arrows in its mouth gleamed-silver, polished, spotless, and whispering of a cruelty so legendary that even the Rankans were afraid to use the 3rd Commando.
Even Theron, who'd come to the throne by way of their swords, if rumor was truth, wanted the 3rd disbanded or under a tight rein. That was why, some said, Tempus, who had created them, had got them back: No one else could control them. Left to their own, they'd slaughter Rankan emperors one by one and auction the throne to the highest bidder-Zip had heard Sync and Kama joke about it when the three were drunk.
Zip let Sync help him up, busy trying to wipe the sticky blood from his palms. He didn't argue about the dead sentry: You didn't argue with Sync, not over something as immutable as the already-dead. You saved it for the plans that could get you killed.
The rest were emerging now: at least twenty fighters-the 3rd never traveled light.
The sight of Kama in her battle dress, with the 3rd's red insignia burned into hardened leather above her right breast and campaign designators scratched below it, made his stomach lurch.
She was unfinished business, would always be. He said, "So, here I am. Talk," and found his tongue unwieldy.
Around her, he realized (as his eyes accustomed themselves to something other than the dead man, handless and footless, who still flopped helplessly in his inner sight), were others of the uptown gangs who masqueraded as authority in Sanctuary: Critias, a covert actionist from the Sacred Band who seldom ventured forth in uniform and never in daylight; Straton, his wide-shouldered, witch ridden partner; Jubal, black as Ischade's cloak and with a look on his face much blacker; Walegrin, the regular army's garrison commander and brother of the S'danzo whose child Zip's men had killed; and a blond woman he didn't know, who wore arena leathers and had a bird perched on her shoulder.
He ought to be wary, he realized-this sort of crowd hadn't gathered for something as mundane as his execution. But his eyes kept sliding back to Kama and trying to fit the persona of her father over the woman who'd taught him things about lovemaking he'd never dreamed were possible.
And then he realized why these uptown hotshots were down in Ratfall; Kama's father. Tempus's minions, all of these were, some by choice, some by duty, some by coercion. And none of them with a good word to say of Zip, except perhaps for the Riddler's daughter.
Fear sharpened his eyesight, and he looked beyond the gathered luminaries to their troops, and farther: to where his rebels skulked. None of them would move to save him-the odds weren't good enough.
And neither Ratfall nor Zip were worth saving, not at the kind of price the 3rd Commando would exact, if the sentry was a good example.
And he was. They'd made sure of that, had his visitors.
As he took deep breaths and resolved to tell nothing to this corps of fancy fighters (including the Stepsons' chief interrogator, Strat), Zip realized that something was indeed worth saving here: Behind the men, in the long shed against which 3rd Commando regulars leaned with studied insolence, was a store of incendiaries purchased from the Beysib glassmakers: bottles in which were alchemical concoctions that, once their wicks were lit and the bottles thrown, exploded with such force that the shards and flame and concussion from even one such bottle could clear a street-or a palace hall.
With or without him, the revolution could continue, as long as the Beysib glassblowers took the PFLS's money and Ilsig will-to-fight held out.
So, having determined that he had something to lose. Zip said again, "Talk, I said. What do you think this is, an uptown dinner party?"
"No," said the woman he didn't know, the one with the hawkish bird upon her shoulder, "it's a revolutionary council -a trial, actually: yours."
When Kama came back from Ratfall, her eyes were red-rimmed and she was so disarrayed that she ran up Molin's back stairs, hoping to have the girls draw her a bath so she could get the Zip-smell off her and the straw out of her hair before the Torch saw her.
But Molin was home: She could hear Torchholder's voice, and that of another Rankan, coming from the front rooms.
She froze in horror, realizing suddenly that she couldn't face him-not now, with her thighs sticky and her blood up, and all her father's heritage aroused in her so that she wanted nothing to do with the half-Rankan, half-Nisi who had saved her life, and whom she owed so much.
But was debt the same as love? Zip's faked and fated "trial" had broken her heart thrice over.
The outcome-the verdict of conditional acquittal-was assured, by Tempus's decree. Zip was the only one who hadn't known it.
It was the crudest thing she'd ever seen men do to another man, and she'd been a willing part of it, the operator in her fascinated by all she saw, by human emotion and its interplay, by the passions of those who'd lost loved ones, and face, trying to justify the one and regain the other-all because Kama's father had ridden down from Ranke, looked upon the doings of Sanctuary's puny mortals, and not been pleased.
Sometimes she hated Tempus more even than she hated the gods.
And so she'd stayed with Zip, after the others had left, to lick the nervous sweat from his fine young body and to wipe the confusion from his heart in the only way she knew.
Zip was... Zip, her aberration: a physical match such as Molin could never be. But that was all. She could never make it more, or let it make itself more, or let Zip convince her it could be more.
He needed help, that was all. And everyone was' using him, dangling him this way and that. She felt sorry for him.
So she gave him comfort in the night. It was nothing.
Yet the memory sent her bolting from Molin's doorstep, because the Torch was too intelligent to be fooled by mumbled excuses or headaches, because Kama just couldn't fake it tonight.
She roamed night-hot streets, though she knew better, almost hoping that some pickpocket or zombie or Beysib would accost her: Like her father, when pushed too hard, Kama craved only open violence. She'd have killed a Stepson or a 3rd Commando ranger, one of her own, if any dared cross her this evening.
She stopped in at the Unicorn, half-hoping for a fight, but no one paid attention to her there.
She wandered back streets on a borrowed horse, letting it drift barracks-ward, until she realized that it had brought her to the White Foal Bridge.
And then, as she gave the horse its head and it crossed the river bridge, she began in earnest to cry.
It was Crit she wanted now, whether to hold him or kill him, she couldn't have said if her life depended on it. But Crit was, as Zip would say, old business, and Crit had noticed that she'd stayed with Zip.
Maybe she'd stayed with Zip because of Crit, brushing hips with his partner, and because even that partner, Strat, had sought warmer company than Critias's Ischade for warmth that Crit reserved to formed ranks and duty squadrons and the next covert operation on his docket.
So when the sorrel string-horse ambled toward Ischade's funny little gate, as if by habit, Kama brushed her eyes angrily with her forearm and blinked away her tears.
In her nostrils was the rank smell of the White Foal in summer, carrying its carrion to the sea, and the perfume of night-blooming flowers of the occult sort that Ischade grew here.