The price of victory- - Thieves World 13 (49 page)

Ischade took the back of a chair and flung it, shoved the table back, rumpling a litter of cloaks, and simply sat down cross-legged on the floor, hands before her. Her eyes rolled back. Her lips parted.

And a light grew between her hands, spinning and spinning in a way he had seen once and more than once.

Like a small Globe of Power, whirling and staining her hands and her face and all the room with its cold glow.

He hunkered down with his hands clasped against his lips and waited, waited, because what she was doing was not the magic he knew in her, pyromancy and necromancy. This was another thing, a thing that was not supposed to exist.

"I don't find him on the surface," she murmured—no mummery, ei ther; Ischade could talk and wield power at the same time, carry on a running dialogue while doing what would raise a sweat on many a talent in the Mageguild. "There's a far-seer over across town. I'll see. She's erratic. Sometimes she's right."

"For godssake, find him!"

"What—" Her eyes snapped shut and open again, present and shocked, as she clapped her hands together and smothered the light.
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"Aaah!" Stilcho cried, and held his hands over his eyes.

Straton and Ischade exchanged a look then which understood some thing Stilcho did not.

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"What is it, dammit?"

Ischade bit her lips and drew in her breath. "Nothing. Nothing need concern you." She gathered her skirts to rise. "I will find him. There's nothing I can do from here. We'll have to search out the trail. Stilcho." She gave him her hand, and he helped her to her feet.

"What is it?" Strat asked again.

But Ischade did not answer him. She flung her cloak about her and walked out the door, which had a disconcerting way ofopeningjust when it had to.

He was last out, and it shut behind them with a thump, as the gate swung open. Stilcho's horse shied and pulled at its tether.

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The bay simply stood. And when he got there, Ischade was holding the reins.

"I'll ride behind," she said.

Old habits came back. He had his mouth open, and shut it. Useless, with Ischade. One did things her way, or one did not, and they might go to hell for all she cared; he wanted her help in the worst way, with a life at stake.

He rose to the saddle and cleared the stirrup for her. She rose lightly up behind and put her arms about him, too damn familiarly.

"Hyyyyaaa!" he yelled at the bay, and it wheeled about and might have unseated her and him; but not him, and damned well not the likes of Ischade, no such luck.

No chance of falling on the road, slick as the stone was. He laid his heels to the bay, and such was the uncertainty of the misty air and the echo off the buildings, sometimes it seemed like it was only Stilcho's horse striking the cobbles.

"My son," Nas-yeni said. It was safe to tell him that much. There were a lot of sons. There had to have been. "You killed my son. Threw him out like garbage." He sat cross-legged, close to his victim in the lantern light.
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"You, I'd like to take to the same place when I'm done with you. Maybe I will."

The Stepson never had said much, just took in his breath when Nas yeni got to work on him, and screamed sometimes, in what voice he had left, but the vomiting had left him with very little voice for screaming. He could still see. Nas-yeni had saved the eyes for last. And the tongue, that last of all. Right now it was the fingernails; and Nas-yeni pulled the needle, heated, from the little cooking brazier he had full of coals.

"Come here, Critias. Let's try another one."

Critias spat at him and tried to kick him, but there was panic in his

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face now, and that kind of hard-breathing sob a man got before he fell apart. Nas-yeni knew. He had practiced, before this.

There was panic in the attempt to scream, too. It was in the pace of things. Nas-yeni had studied these matters. Had done this service for certain of the gangs, who wanted something from one of their own. Rankans he had never touched. He had never risked himself. His mission was too holy, his revenge too important, to risk Rankan trouble. Just
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internal matters.

Never too hasty. Take one's time. Never let the victim get his defenses together either, or forget there was worse to come.

"He was seventeen, pig."

Slowly, through the afternoon streets, still in drizzling rain, the shops'

business slow, the citizens who did find reason to be out on the streets moving about all muffled up in cloaks.

But no few stared at the sight of a Stepson with a black-cloaked woman riding pillion behind him, slowly and deliberately through street and street and street; and a one-eyed man beside them, where Stepsons had searched frantically all day, and rousted citizens and searched ware houses.

Perhaps it was the fey, dire feeling about them, that coursed through Strafs bones and set his teeth on edge.

"Wrong," Stilcho said softly, above the soft clip and clop of hooves on cobbles. "Wrong—"

"Is it me you see?" Ischade whispered. "Or else?"
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"I don't know," Stilcho said hollowly, in a voice which itself could raise the hair's at a man's nape.

"Hereabouts," Ischade whispered. "Hereabouts. Steady, Straton. Don't flinch."

He felt something at his back—felt it, like fire and ice, burning through his armor, into his bones. And suddenly the horse whickered and gave a thrust of its hindquarters, skittering forward and taking an undirected turn into an alley, into a maze of balconies and rubbish and discarded barrels. It was crazed. It headed them up a nook and stopped, facing a dead end.

"Here," Ischade said.

'Where?" Blank walls surrounded them, windowless, doorless. Strat looked about them in desperation, and twisted about as Ischade slid down.

"The horse knows. It has the scent."

He dismounted and dropped the reins, drawing his sword, looking above them, for some window, any aperture.

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The horse pawed the cobbles, put down its head and nosed the rubbish.

Above a hinged iron plate set in the cobbles.

"Damn," Strat said. "Damn."

And dropped to his knees and pulled at it with his fingers. It would not move.

"Bolted," he said. "Dammitall!" Desperation welled up in him.

Blue fire ran around the opening, down the hinges, dim in daylight. Metal grated.

"Now," Ischade said.

He pulled and it lifted.

And the sound, the half-human sound that came from somewhere in the depths, ran right through his nerves.

He did not stop. He saw the steps and he went, writhed his way through a hole too small for a man to take easily, down into the echoing dark.

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"Stilcho!" he heard Ischade whisper urgently. He heard the slither of someone behind him, but another such moan wrenched at his gut. He felt his way down and down, one hand for the sword, one for the wall, his eyes straining at dark absolute except the little gray light that got through from the open trap above, and that fitful, with his partners leaning over it.

He heard laughter echoing through the vault, soft and awful, coming from everywhere.

And caught himself with his heart in his throat as his foot missed a step and he saved himself at an unexpected landing. There was a chain there. He grasped it and felt it to find the steps, descending again, till he heard the sound in front of him

He felt ahead of him with his sword, probing the dark till it suddenly touched stone. He felt either side and found nothing, and, with his bare hand, in front of him, and felt a wooden door. He put his ear against it.

And pulled it open, carefully, carefully as dim lamplight spilled against his eye.

". . . friend," he heard.

And a sound hardly human at all.

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He saw a light, old columns, watermarked, a pair of figures low to the ground against a mound of dirt. He eased his way in, flexing his hand on his sword-hilt, hardly daring to breathe.

The damned hinge creaked. The man looked around.

"Haiiii!" Strat yelled, for what shock could do, and was halfway across the room before the man jerked Crit up by the hair and brought the point of a dagger right up under Crit's left eye.

"You want him blinded? Drop it! Drop the sword!"

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Cnt tried to say something Fool, probably And arched his back and struggled as the knife jabbed

"Drop it'"

Strat dropped it, and saw the man drop the knife and snatch two handed at something in the straw beside him, but he was already moving, launched with all his strength and speed across that intervening space—

Crossbow Cut's Firing The bolt tore into him He spun with it,
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staggered and kept moving, clawing his way up again, tearing the dagger from his belt, hurling himself and the weapon missilelike against the man with the spent bow

He hit the man in the gut, he felt that, felt the rush of blood over his hand, the tumble of threshing limbs tangled with his as he went down with the bolt shocked by the fall and the dark closing around him

"I couldn't stop it," Stilcho said "I couldn't reach him—"

Ischade held up her hand, dismissal, absolution—whatever Stilcho would accept—and looked down at the carnage that spread blood through the straw

"Witch—" Cnt said, or tried to say, looking at her through the one eye that still would work It came out a raven's croak And after so much else, he spat at her

"Gratitude Of course." Straton washer concern She tucked her robes away from the blood that was everywhere and felt of his back and his neck, where a pulse still beat The bolt had hit high The bad shoulder Again.

"Damn you," Cnt whispered, "damn you to hell, let him be."

She touched Strat's face when Stilcho had turned him over He was
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bloody everywhere. He was half-conscious, and he tried to say some thing, but she touched his lips and his brow and put him to sleep She did other things too, and bent and kissed him on the brow and on the lips, bloody as he was

"Let him be, you damned ghoul'"

Somewhere Cntias had found that much voice, and struggled to an elbow, to try to throw his body into her, if only that

She whirled and stopped him, her hand on his throat, and flung him back down, spat at again

But she restrained herself "He came after you He came to me for you But you will not remember that " She held him with her eyes only now, cut him free with the knife she drew from the dead man, then put her joined hands to Cnt's face, and let the mage-fire flow, mending the eye, the hands, everything that might cripple a man "Sleep, Cntias "

It was part of her curse and her talent, that mesmeric talent that could

erase her very passage from a mind, make seeing eyes blind, create elabo rate memories that had never been
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Such, largely, had been her affair with Strat until she began to take risks, with Stilcho to die his deaths, assuage her needs, fulfill the curse

"Come," she said to Stilcho, taking him by the hand "We have Mona to see to Cnt will take care of things "

And drew Stilcho with her, hesitating at the last, bewildered, surely But she turned his face to her with a touch of her finger, and erased his memory of this place, before she led him up to the light

It was luck, surely, that a searcher spotted Strat's bay horse m an alley searchers had been down a dozen times that day, spotted the trap left up, and investigated, all on a hunch that had come on the man even to go down that often-searched alley Cnt had run out of strength, dragging Strat's half-conscious weight toward the stairs, collapsing there in the dark with Strat damned near bleeding to death and the stairs yet to go.

After that it was horse litters to get them as far as the guard-barracks infirmary, Cnt more exhausted and bruised and with cracked ribs that bandages could help, Strat the worse off of the two of them.

Strat, who had come through for him and done what he had done, before the damned IIsigi lunatic had had time to carve him up Strat, who had distracted the killer and taken the bolt, knowing he was going to take
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it, because that was the only way to get across that distance and knife the bastard that was going to cut Cnt's throat.

Strat had had enough strength left m him to cut Cnt loose And then fainted

Cnt ought to have been in his own bed He was not He sat by Strat's, just holding onto his arm, thinking, damn, he would go to the witch by riverside, he would go down there and he would beg if that was what it took The sight of Strat deliberately distracting that bastard, deliberately taking the shot and still having it in him to aim true and hard—would haunt him, like the thing Strat had said when he managed, m his pain, to cut him loose—