Sweat never stayed long enough to drip in the chill winter air, but breaths puffed white from noses and mouths in the taut pearly light, and grunts and taunts carried well in the crisp morning air. Tempus ducked his head and rubbed his mouth to hide his mirth as a stream of scatological invective sounded: one of the branch-draggers exhorting the loungers to get to work. Were curses soldats, the Stepsons would all be men of ease. The fence-sitters, counter cursing the work-boss gamely, slipped to the ground; the loungers gave up their wall. In front of him, they pretended to be untouched by the ill omen of accidental death. But he, too, was uneasy in the face of tragedy without reason, bereft of the glory of death in the field. All of them feared accident, mindless fortune's disfavor: they lived by luck, as much as by the god's favor. As the dozen men, more or less in a body, headed toward the altar and the brake beyond, Temp us felt the god rustling inside him, and took time to upbraid Va-shanka for wasting an adherent. They were not on the best of terms, the man and his god. His temper was hard-held these days, and the gloom of winter quartering was making him fey-not to mention reports of the Mygdonians' foul depredations to the far north, the quelling of which he was not free to join....
First, he noticed that two people sauntering casually down the altar's hillock toward him were not familiar; and then, that none of his Stepsons were moving: each was stock-still. A cold overswept him, like a wind-driven wave, and rolled on toward the barracks. Above, the pale sky clouded over; a silky dusk swallowed the day. Black clouds gathered; over Vashanka's altar two luminous, red moons appeared high up in the inky air, as if some huge night-cat lurked on a lofty perch. Watching the pair approaching (through unmoving men who did not even know they stood now in darkness), swathed in a pale nimbus which illuminated their path as the witchcold had heralded their coming, Temp us muttered under his breath. His hand went to his hip, where no weapon lay, but only a knotted cord. Studying the strangers without looking at them straight-on, leaning back, his arms outstretched along the fencetop, he waited.
The red lights glowing above Vashanka's altar winked out. The ground shuddered; the altar stones tumbled to the ground. Wonderful, he thought. Just great. He let his eyes slide over his men, asleep between blinks, and wondered how far the spell extended, whether they were ensor-celed in their bunks, or in the mess, or on their horses as they made their rounds in the country or the town.
Well, Vashanka? he tested. It's your altar they took down. But the god was silent.
Besides the two coming at measured pace across the ground rutted with chariot tracks, nothing moved. No bird cried or insect chittered, no Stepson so much as snored. The companion of the imposing man in the thick, fur mantle had him by the elbow. Who was helping whom, Tempus could not at first determine. He tried to think where he had seen that austere face- soul-shriveling eyes so sad, bones so fine and yet full of vitality beneath the black, silver-starred hair-and then blew out a sibilant breath when he realized what power approached over the rutted, Sanctuary ground. The companion whose lithe musculature and bare, tanned skin were counterpointed by an enameled tunic of scale-armor and soft low boots was either a female or the prettiest eunuch Tempus had ever seen- whichever, she/he was trouble, coming in from some nonphysical realm on the arm of the en telechy of a shadow lord, master of the once-in-a-while archipelago that bore his name: Askelon, lord of dreams.
When they reached him, Tempus nodded carefully and said, very quietly in a noncommittal way that almost passed for deference, "Salutations, Ash. What brings you into so poor a realm?"
Askelon's proud lips parted; the skin around them was too pale. It was a woman who held his arm; her health made him seem the more pallid, but when he spoke, his words were ringing basso profundo: "Life to you, Riddler. What are you called here?"
"Spare me your curses, mage." To such a power, the title alone was an insult. And the shadow lord knew it well.
Around his temples, stars of silver floated, stirred by a breeze. His colorless eyes grew darker, draining the angry clouds from the sky: "You have not answered me."
"Nor you, me."
The woman looked in disbelief upon Tempus. She opened her lips, but Askelon touched them with a gloved hand. From the gauntlet's cuff a single drop of blood ran down his left arm to drip upon the sand. He looked at it somberly, then up at Tempus. "I seek your sister, what else? I will not harm her."
"But will you cause her to harm herself?"
The shadow lord whom Tempus had called Ash, so familiarly, rubbed the bloody trail from his elbow back up to his wrist. "Surely you do not think you can protect her from me? Have I not accomplished even this? Am I not real?" He held his gloved hands out, turned them over, let them flap abruptly down against his thighs. Niko, who had been roused from deep meditation in the barracks by the cold which had spread sleep over the waking, skidded to a halt and peered around the curve of the fence, his teeth gritted hard to stay their chatter.
"No." Tempus had replied to Askelon's first question with that sensitive little smile which meant he was considering commencing some incredible slaughter; "Yes" to his second; "Yes, indeed" to the third.
"And would I be here now," the dream lord continued, "in so ignominious a state if not for the havoc she has wrought?"
"I don't know what havoc she's wrought that could have touched you out there. But I take it that last night's deadly mist was your harbinger. Why come to me, Ash? I'm not involved with her in any way."
"You connived to release her from imprisonment, Tempus-it is Tempus, so the dreams of the Sanctuarites tell me. And they tell me other things, too. I am here, sleepless one, to warn you: though I cannot reach you through dreams, have no doubt: I can reach you. All of these, you consider yours...."He waved his hand to encompass the still men, frozen unknowing upon the field. "They are mine now. I can claim them any time."
"What do you want, Ash?"
"I want you to refrain from interfering with me while I am here. I will see her, and settle a score with her, and if you are circumspect, when I leave, your vicious little band of cutthroats will be returned to you, unharmed, uncomprehending."
"All that, to make sure of me? I don't respond well to flattery. You will force me to a gesture by trying to prevent one. I don't care what you do about Cime whatever you do, you will be doing me a favor. Release my people, and go about your quest."