The price of victory- - Thieves World 13 (40 page)

The Magicians

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ILSIGI MAGES:

MARKMOR—A powerful, ambitious, youthful wizard.

MARYPE—His arrogant, yet blundering, apprentice.

MIZRAITH—Marype's father, slain by Markmor shortly after
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the Prince arrived in Sanctuary.

RANKAN HAZARDS DWELLING AT THE MAGEGUILD;

RANDAL; WITCHY-EARS—The only mage ever admitted into the Sacred Band of Stepsons or trusted by them. Now a teacher at the Mageguild.

Those who adhere to no hierarchy or discipline but their own:

ENAS YORL—Quasi-immortal mage cursed with eternal life and a constantly changing physical form.

ISCHADE—Necromancer and thief. Her curse is passed to her lovers who die from it. Since the diminution of magic in Sanctuary, she has been in isolation at her house on the White Foal River.

STRICK;TORAZELAN STRICK TIFIRAQA—White Mage who has made Sanctuary his home. He will help anyone who comes to him, but there is always a Price, sometimes trivial and sometimes not, for his aid.

Visitors in Sanctuary

THE SHEPHERD—A figure of considerable mystery. By his panoply he
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might be an Ilsigi warrior—but all such men have been dead for years.

The Rankans Living in Sanctuary

CHENAYA; DAUGHTER OF THE sw—A beautiful and powerful young woman, the Prince's cousin, who is fated never to lose a fight. In her

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arrogance and innocence she made more enemies in Sanctuary than even fate could handle and has left town until her reputation repairs itself.

DAYRNE—Her companion and trainer.

LEYN, QUIJEN, DISMAS AND GESTUS—Her friends and gladiators at her father's school.

DAPHNE—Rankan noblewoman and first wife of Prince Kadakithis. Os tensibly sent to safety before the arrival of the Beysib, she was actually kidnapped and sold into slavery on Scavenger's Island where Chenaya rescued her. She is estranged from her husband.

PRINCE KADAKITHIS—Charismatic but somewhat naive half-brother of the assassinated Emperor, Abakithis.

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LOWAN VIGELES—Half-brother ofMolin Torchholder, father of Chenaya. A wealthy aristocrat self-exiled to Sanctuary and hoping to return to the Rankan capital in triumph someday. He operates a gladiator school at his Land's End estate and has built a small, temporary arena there.

MOLIN TORCHHOLDER; TORCH—Archpriest of Sanctuary's wargod (whichever deity that is at the moment). Architect for the rebuilt walls of Sanctuary, Supreme bureaucratic administrator of the city.

RASHAN; THE EYE OF SAVANKALA—Priest and Judge of Savankala. Highest ranking Rankan in Sanctuary prior to the arrival of the Prince, now allied with Chenaya's disaffected Rankans at Land's End.

STEPSONS; SACRED BANDERS—members of a mercenary unit loyal to Tempus. Their years in Sanctuary were among the worst in their history and all but a few of them have gratefully left town.

CRITIAS;CRIT—Longtime mercenary in the company. Tempus left him in charge of peace-keeping in Sanctuary when everyone else left. Also the partner of Straton, though that pairing has been in disarray for some time now.

STRATON; STRAT; ACE—Partner ofCritias. Injured by the PELS at the start of the False Plague Riots. He has been Ischade's lover

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and though her curse has not killed him, most of his former associates count him among Sanctuary's damned.

WALEGRIN—Rankan army officer assigned to the Sanctuary garrison where his father had been slain by the S'danzo many years before. He is now one of three officers responsible for the peace in Sanctuary. He is also Illyra 's half-brother.

The Beysib

SHUPANSEA; sw-SEA—Head of the Beysib exiles in Sanctuary; mortal avatar of the Beysib mother goddess. Lover of Prince Kadakithis whom she wishes to marry.

Lynn Abbey

"No! No more blood! Make it stop!"

Shupansea awoke at the sound of her own scream. The nightmare had propelled her out of bed and to the window of her bedchamber. With a
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trembling hand she pulled the casement shut-This wasn't the first time she'd found herself before an open window; wasn't the first time she shed a cold sweat wondering what would happen if some night she did not scream herself awake.

"0 Beysa, forgive my intrusion. I—I heard you scream . . ."

Shupansea turned to the lamplight and faced the frightened eyes of Kammesin, the woman who had cared for her since infancy. "It was nothing—a noise in the dark. Nothing at all."

Kammesin did not relax. The old woman's eyes remained wide, round and steadily unblinking. Mother Bey! Had she been exiled so long among the fluttering Rankans that her own people looked strange and un nerving? Was her soul forgetting that the fixed stare was a gesture of honesty and transparency as much as it was a measure of uncontrolled anxiety? And had she, herself, blinked even once since waking from the nightmare?

"Yes, Kam-sin," she admitted, forcing the membrane to withdraw and her eyelids to descend. "It was the nightmare, again. But I'm all right now. Just light my lamp, then you go back to sleep."

The woman gave a shrug that every servant knew. It meant the same to both Rankans and Beysibs; disbelief and resignation. "As you wish, 0

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Beysa." She lit the lamp beside the bed as she left.

A flush of shame burned across the Beysa's face as she heard the door

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close. Those folk who believed aristocrats were unaware of their servants had no understanding of the matter at all. Shupansea felt her old nurse's censure as a sad, painful twinge in her heart. All her life she had confided in Kammesin, but now, when she was overflowing with despair, she could speak to no one.

In point of fact, the Beysa wished to speak to the goddess Bey. She wanted to know why, after these seasons in Sanctuary, her sleep was haunted by memories of the final, bloody days of her brief, unsanctified reign over the Beysin Empire. But it had been more than a year since the Mother's voice had resounded within her head. Mother Bey, like every thing else magical or divine in Sanctuary, had been reduced to shadow strength.

The town which had been god-ridden was now virtually god-less. Mother Bey was the merest whisper of empathy in Her avatar's mind. A calming whisper nonetheless, and it seemed to say that the goddess was content with exile and did not plan to return home soon.

That's not enough, the Beysa thought loudly enough, she hoped, for
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the goddess to hear. / can't stay here and remember the past, too.

The flicker of empathy shifted, resonating love and the smiling face of Prince Kadakithis. Shupansea grit her teeth and shook the feeling away. Mother Bey had strengthened every cynic's hand when She tumbled into a divine infatuation with the wargod, Stormbringer. Half the people in Sanctuary—if not the known world—had shared hot frustration in their dreams as the would-be lovers contended with a mismatch of immortal anatomy.

Such divine emissions had ceased when the magical nouma of Sanctu ary was burned away, but Shupansea knew the pair chased each other still and she was more than slightly embarrassed by her progenitor's lusty behavior.

Though Shupansea purged the goddess from her thoughts and feeling, the prince was not so easily removed. Surely it was no coincidence that the nightmares had started right after they'd announced their intended. but still unscheduled, marriage. Right after she'd decided to abide by Rankan standards of acceptable behavior and moved her personal entou rage out of Kadakithis's suite.

Love had never been part of Shupansea's emotional vocabulary. In deed, no Beysa had ever dared to love—not when her blood was venom and all her male offspring were condemned to death in her womb. At
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home they sacrificed the royal consort, and the Beysa insured her line with casual, guilt-free affairs.

Could she doubt for one heartbeat that the nightmares—the cold fear

that lived in her belly—were the underside of her love for an unlucky Rankan prince?

Shupansea shivered from the fear, and the everpresent dampness that permeated the palace. She shrugged her gown over her shoulders and looked beside the bed for her slippers. It was no wonder that Rankan women swaddled themselves in layer upon layer of cloth. Sanctuary was always damp; it was hot and damp in the summer, then chilly and damp the rest of the time. Either way you wrapped yourself in soft, absorbent cloth for comfort.

She opened the door quietly, half expecting to find Kammesin crouched beside the latch-hole. The corridor was empty, but her lamp light caught the final sway of a nearby drapery. Despite her age, Kam-sin had retreated to her alcove and, after another moment, began snoring gently.

A faint smile crossed the Beysa's lips as she headed for the sunrise wing. Twice a year everyone who was anyone changed residence from
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one side of the palace to the other—adjusting the social hierarchy in the process. The best people had sunrise suites in the warmer months and sunset suites in the dreary winter.

At first Shupansea and her comrades-in-exile had taken all the good rooms for themselves—winning themselves no friends among the Rankans. Moving days had been tense, bristly affairs with frequent brawls between the servants and the occasional duel between the incom ing and outgoing residents.

The palace, like the city, had mellowed in the last year. Some of the Beysibs had moved to renovated estates beyond the walls; some of the Rankans had as well. Those who remained got along better—as well as any court in either empire—and Beysibs began mixing with Rankans on both sides of fortune's wheel.

The man whom Shupansea sought could have had an apartment on the sunset side, but he chose, for reasons of his own, to live in counterpoint to both the Beysa and his prince.

"Ambitious people have stronger stories," Hakiem always insisted when moving day found him marshalling his possessions against the tide.

"And unhappy people have tragic ones."

The Beysa never argued with the storyteller, who was her closest
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friend among the natives. Privately she thought he was wrong, at least about tragedy. She knew her own story, and that of Prince Kadakithis, and she'd gladly have changed with a sunrise resident whose life was both comfortable and dull.

Trusted servants slept in alcoves and on pallets beside their masters'

doors. The more alert and reliable managed to be wide-awake as Shupan 220 UNEASY ALLIANCES

sea walked by with her lamp. Most of the Beysibs kowtowed to her shadow, some of the Rankans glowered with scant respect—but not as many as once had done. The Beysa ignored them, which was what they all expected anyway.

Hakiem's knotted latchstring was drawn to the inside of his door, and Shupansea was suddenly aware of the late hour. The storyteller said he was always ready to be her ears—any day, any night—but he wasn't a young man. Men and women offered themselves to a Beysa or a Prince in the sublime confidence that their gift would never be called.

Twice Shupansea pulled her knuckles soundlessly back from the door. The third time she touched the wood, but still there was no sound as the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.

"Hakiem? Friend?"

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The room was empty; the storyteller's pallet was rolled up into a day cushion. Shupansea felt awkward and foolish. Hakiem was old enough to be her father, but that didn't quite make him old. Certainly he was charming, witty, and—now that he was better groomed and bathed regu larly—cut a handsome figure among the court ladies who commonly complained that men talked only of war and politics. Surely he had offers

—no doubt his assignations were more easily arranged from this side of the palace.

She resolved to make no mention of her untimely visit and was about to leave when the lamplight fell on a pile of drawings. She saw her prince with a bloody sword, and herself with bloody hands—and curiosity got the better of her good sense.

Lighting Hakiem's lamp from her own, Shupansea settled down to examine the colored sketches more closely.

Not all of Sanctuary ran on palace time. The Street of Red Lanterns was ablaze well past midnight. The Maze didn't start to get interesting until respectable people pulled their shutters in. And a dive like the Vulgar Unicorn hit its stride a good deal later than that.

Through all Sanctuary's vicissitudes, the Vulgar Unicorn had been a touchstone of a sort of stability. Its bartenders—human and otherwise—

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were uniformly ugly; its wenches were invariably on the downside of careers that had never looked promising. Its food was uncompromisingly vile, and the swill they tapped from their kegs . . . The beer at the Vulgar Unicorn was generally regarded to be the worst of mixing sludge from the harbor and goat urine; the wine—well, the beer was better than the wine.