"I was lucky I found your pisshole at all, Wriggly. Let me go or you're going to lose the rest of those fingers, sure as Lord Storm's anger rocks even this god ridden garbage heap of a peninsula-"
Someone stepped up to the bar, and One-Thumb, with a wrench of wrist, went to serve him, meanwhile motioning close a girl whose breasts were mottled gray with dirt and pinkish white where she had sweated it away, saying to her that Niko was to be taken to the office.
In it, he watched the man called One-Thumb through a one-way mirror, and fidgeted. Eventually, though he saw no reason why it happened, a door he had thought to be a closet's opened behind him, and a woman stepped in, clad in Ilsig doeskin leggings. She said, "What word did my brother send to me?"
He told her, thinking, watching her, that her eyes were gray like Askelon's, and her hair was arrestingly black and silver, and that she did not in any way resemble Tempus. When he was finished with his story and his warning that she not, under any circumstances, go out this evening-^not, upon her life, attend the Mageguild fete, she laughed, a sweet tinkle so inappropriate his spine chilled and he stiffened.
"Tell my brother not to be afraid. You must not know him well, to take his terror of the adepts so seriously." She moved close to him, and he drowned in her storm-cloud eyes while her hand went to his swordbelt and by it she pulled him close. "Have you money, Stepson? And some time to spend?"
Niko beat a hasty retreat with her mocking, throaty laughter chasing him down the stairs. She called after him that she only wanted to have him give her love to Tempus. As he made the landing near the bar, he heard the door at the stairs' top slam shut. He was out of there like a torqued arrow-so fast he forgot to pay for his drink, and yet, when he remembered it, on the street where his horse waited, no one had come chasing him. Looking up at the sky, he estimated he could just make the Mageguild in time, if he did not get lost again.
4
Thinking back over the last ten months, Tempus realized he should have expected something like this. Vashanka was weakening steadily: something had removed the god's name from Kadakithis' palace dome; the state cult's temple had proved unbuildable, its grounds defiled and its priest a defiler; the ritual of the Tenslaying had been interrupted by Cime and her fire, and he and Vashanka had begotten a male child upon the First Consort which the god did not seem to want to claim; Abarsis had been allowed to throw his life away without regard to the fact that he had been Vashanka's premier warrior priest. Now the field altar his mercenaries had built had been tumbled to the ground before his eyes by one of Abarsis' teachers, an entelechy chosen specifically to balance the beserker influence of the god. And he, Tempus, was imprisoned in his own quarters by a Froth Daughter in an all-too-human body intent on exacting from him recompense for what his sister had denied her.
Glumly he wondered if his god could be undergoing a midlife crisis, then if he too was, since Vashanka and he were linked by the Law of Consonance. Certainly, Jihan's proclamation of intended rape had taken him aback. He had not been taken aback by anything in years. "Rapist, they call you, and with good reason," she had said, reaching up under the scale-armor corselet to wriggle out of her loinguard. "We will see how you like it, in receipt of what you're used to giving out." He could not stop her, or refrain from responding to her. Cime had interrupted Jihan's scheduled tryst with Askelon, perhaps aborted it. The body which faced him had been chosen for a woman's retribution. Later she said to him, rubbing the imprint of her scale-armor from his loins with a high-veined hand: "Have you never heard of letting the lady win?"
"No," he replied, genuinely puzzled. "Jihan, are you saying I was unfair?"
"Only arcane, weighting the scales to your side. Love without feeling, mind caress, spell-excitation. ... I am new to flesh. I hope you are well chastized and repentant," she giggled, just briefly, before his words found her ears: "I warn you, straight-out: those who love me die of it, and those I favor are fated to spurn me."
"You are an arrogant man. You think I care? I should have struck you more viciously." Her flat hand slapped, more than playfully, down upon his belly. "He-" she meant Askelon "-cannot spare me any of his substance. I do this for him, that he not look upon me hungry for a man and know shame. You saw his wrist, where she skewered him...."
"I don't fancy a gift from him, convenient or no." He was going to pull her up beside him, where he might casually get his hands around her fine, muscular throat. But she sat back and retorted, "You think he would suggest this? Or even know of it? I take what I choose from men, and we do not discuss it. It is all I can do for him. And you owe me whatever price I care to name-your own sister took from me my husband before ever his lips touched mine. When my father chose me from my sisters to be sent to ease Askelon's loneliness, I had a choice-yea or nay-and a year to make it. I studied him, and felt love enough to come to human flesh to claim it. To become human-you concede that I am, for argument's sake?"
He did that-her spectacular body, sheathed in muscle, taut and sensuous, was too powerful and yet too shapely to be mortal, but even so, he did not critique her.
"Then," she continued, rising up, hands on her impossibly slim waist, pacing as she spoke in a rustle of armor-scales, "consider my plight. To become human for the love of a demiurge, and then not to be able to claim him....It is done, I have this form, I cannot undo it until its time is up. And since I cannot collect satisfaction from her-he has forbidden me that pleasure-all the powers on the twelfth plane agree: I may have what I wish from you. And what I wish, I have made quite plain." Her voice was deepening. She took a step toward him.
He objected, and she laughed, "You should see your face."
"I can imagine. You are a very attractive . . . lady, and you come with impeccable credentials from an unimpeachable source. So if you are inexperienced in the ways of the world, brash and awkward and ineffective because of that, I suppose I must excuse you. Thus, I shall make allowances." His one hand raised, gestured, scooped up her loinguard and tossed it at her. "Get dressed, get out of here. Go back to your master, familiar, and tell him I do not any longer pay my sister's debts."
Then, finally, she came at him: "You mistake me. I am not asking you, I am telling you." She reached him, crouched down, thighs together, hands on her knees, knees on what had once been Jubal the Slaver's bed. "This is a real debt, in lieu of payment for which, my patron and the elementals will exact-"
He clipped her exactly behind her right ear, and she fell across him, senseless.
Other things she had said, earlier in passion, rang in his head: that should he in any way displease her, her duty would then be plain: he and Vashanka could both be disciplined by way of the child they had together begotten on one of Molin Torchholder's temple dancers.
He was not sure how he felt about that, as he was not sure how he felt about Askelon's offer of mortality or Vashanka's cowardice, or the positives and negatives of his sister's self-engendered fate.
He gave the unconscious woman over to his Stepsons with instructions that made the three he had hailed grin widely. He could not estimate how long they would be able to hold her- however long they managed it, it had better be long enough. The Stepson who had come from seeking Niko in Sanctuary found him, garbed for business, saddling a Tros horse in the stables.
"Stealth said," the gruff, sloe-eyed commando reported: " 'She said stay out of it, no need to fear.' He's staying with the archmage, or whatever it is. He's going to the Mageguild party and suggests you try and drop by." A feral grin stole over the mercenary's face. He knew something was up. "Need anybody on your right for this, commander?"