The price of victory- - Thieves World 13 (98 page)

And Crit's voice saying; "You damn fool!"

As someone gathered him off the pavement and cradled his head in his
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lap—someone familiar, over a lot of years, someone who kept saying,

"Ace, gods, I'm sorry."

The horse was gone—turned to air beneath him. It was the last gift she had given him. And it was gone. His friends took it from him. Or she did. There was only the taste of blood in his mouth.

She did not know why she did what she did—it was only the night, and the feeling of change in the wind, and the feeling of things slipping away from her. She murmured, though perhaps none of her folk could hear her, "Protection for my own is all I can do now. But that I do, as best I can."

She wanted her own with her tonight. Behind her closed lids she saw the dying of altar fires, she heard the stirring of gods in their shrines—she

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gathered her forces on this night and she wove spells to protect this place, such as she could

Against all wisdom to the contrary—she drew her servants around her, revised the lines of her power—drew them from all over the city to protect them on this night: she felt Haught's battering at tlie wards that held him, felt the pleas he flung at her, like a moth battering at the
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glass—

But one face she saw more than all the rest, one touch she wanted most, and, dyed by a thousand murders and a thousand more black sins, she tried to stop thinking about him, telling herself no, let him go, stop the anger, stop the wanting—

He could be in Hell itself and she could draw him to her: pyromant, necromant, she could still raise the dead—singly and with effort, who once had summoned legions out of Hell's long patrol and set them to march against her rival—

She had lost a great deal—she had blown a great deal of her power away on the winds, had seen the dust of a shattered Globe of Power settle like a dream over Sanctuary, making mages of beggars and diminishing the power of the mage-born irrevocably: if that were not so she could lift her hand, raise the lightnings, change the wind—take the failing Empire, make herself that power that would shake the world.

As it was, the Empire would fail and fall, the greatness would slip away from Ranke, and the marbles crumble and the decline, centuries long, bring new powers, new mages, new wizardry—

She was done with dreams of power. She let Ranke enter its long, long slide to destruction, she listened to the rising of the wind, the echo of that wind in empty fanes and altars, she said softly, ever so softly,
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"Goodbye, Strat."

Knowing they would not meet again, even in Hell—her curse being immortality.

"Damn you!" Strat said, when they had gotten him onto his feet. But Crit held him there, in the cold, dusty light of dawn, a stinging wind skirling through the streets of Sanctuary, Crit had his arms about him, held him like a brother.

There was no sign of the bay horse. He ached from head to foot. His knee and his elbow were bleeding, and would stiffen.

"Get up on my horse," Crit said then. "We'll get you another."

He looked from one to the other of them in this beginning of dawn—

Crit and Randal,'and it was strange, as if having lost everything he had, he could feel so free—

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So damnably nothing-left-to-lose—except Crit, standing there holding him on his feet, Randal supporting him from the other side.

He let them help him to the saddle, he let Crit and Randal lead him through the first stir of morning in the streets. He listened to Crit telling him how Shepherd had told him where he had to search, he listened to Randal saying there was something strange in this wind . . .

Shepherd met them at the turning. Shepherd said—leaning on the saddlebow of the big mud-colored horse, and looking straight at them,

"Our service is done. Time we were moving on."

A gust of wind rocked at them. A flash of light hit their faces. Crit's horse shied and stood with its ears back, Crit and Randal holding it while Strat held on—and whatever had been Shepherd became a burst of light, a grim figure on a dark horse; a rising whirlwind, and a boy's voice saying,

"Follow the Shepherd. . . ."

"Abarsis . . ." Strat had no idea which of them had said it, or whether his eyes really remembered the figure in the light.

Follow the Shepherd. ...

Time we were moving on ...

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Winds out of the desert battered at Sanctuary's shutters, swirled sting ing clouds of sand and dust against a brazen sun.

Something fled shrieking on that wind, unbound—a witch's disem bodied soul skirled three times about the towers of the Lancothis house, skimmed forlornly along the river and flew—formless and lost—before the gale.

So Haught reported, arriving wind-scoured and dusty at the river house that day. It was a much-chastened Haught who kissed the hem of Ischade's black robe and begged shelter from this wind.

Ischade considered this contrition. "Don't trust him," Stilcho said coldly, Stilcho being at least the most privileged of her servants, and Haught's logical rival.

"I don't," she said plainly, and picked up her cloak and put it on.

"Stay here," she said. "You'll be safe, at least, whatever happens. . . ."

She left then, took to the winds herself, and lighted in raven-shape by the city gate, where a sullen, closely wrapped crowd had gathered—a crowd through which she moved as a black-cloaked woman, willing no one to see her, or if they saw—to forget that they had seen; that gift she still had undiminished.

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She came on the rumor Haught had brought—was there to see the last of the Rankene forces ride through the streets, out the gates.

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They were very few—amazingly few, the crowd murmured, wondering if there were not more to come.

A handful of meres; the few remaining of the 3rd Commando; and last to leave, the Stepsons, Randal the mage; Critias . . . with Strat beside him, on a tall dun horse, no banners, no haste. Strat did not even turn his head as he rode past, near enough she could have touched him.

The riders passed the gates, in blowing dust so thick it made shadows of them, made them nothing more than ghosts in the golden light.

For a moment the crowd began to drift—but one left the gate, one went out leading a mule, quickly lost in the dust. Some said it was an other mere; some said it was one of the rebels—looking for revenge, perhaps, Sanctuary's last violence aimed at Ranke.

Ischade knew that boy-almost-man—a scoundrel named Zip, or some such, servant of a god inimical to her: she felt that presence strongly when he passed, before the crowd began to disperse.

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After that was just the dust, just the ghosts of buildings in what should have been bright day, the hill lost in haze and dust, yellow sand skirling along the streets.

Roxane was gone, to heaven or to hell or whatever demon wanted her. The gods of Ranke deserted their shrines. Sanctuary was falling away from the Empire, the forces that had sustained Ranke were leaving and she might have followed them—but could not, not as far as they went, and not where the god might lead them. She was always a creature of the shadows, and of candlelight, and needed lives to sustain her life—

Except his.

She cherished that one claim to virtue.

Robin Wayne Bailey

The shallow waters of the White Foal glimmered blackly in the late night, purling with a suspiciously sweet rush and gurgle over its stony bottom. It whisper-whispered, as if it ferried secrets; deepening, as it went south between its inauspicious banks toward Sanctuary and Down wind and beyond to the sea. Sharp as a razor's cut was the line where the water touched the land at the fording point between Apple Lane and the
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Generals' Road, but looking far up or down its course there was no telling the river from the sky. For all that a fanciful mind could guess, it might have flowed down from a source somewhere in the dark heavens to touch the earth only briefly, here at the end of the world, before it plum meted over the edge and on, to the underworld. This river, with all the detritus that it carried, with all the dead who had washed up on its shores, with all the souls who had given themselves in despair to its waves, this river would make such a fitting link.

But the lone rider, who sat quietly astride a huge gray horse in the middle of the ford, watching the water foam and rill around the animal's fetlocks, was no poet, just a soul weighed down with weariness and bur dens of the spirit. Such thoughts were only the shrapnel of too many sleepless nights, easily kept at bay by drawing a dusty cloak tighter around the shoulders, and pulling a dusty hood closer to shadow one's face.

Sabellia, too, Bright Moon-mother, had shadowed Her face this night, turned away from the world below, and surrendered the world to the darkness. Even the stars, those myriad sparkling tears She had shed for

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Her heavenly children and for the children of the earth, those, too, were hidden behind a thick, cloudy veil.

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The rider's gaze turned away from the sky and toward Sanctuary. At a nudge, the horse moved up the muddy bank and turned down the Gener als' Road, its hooves clip-clopping smartly on the brick-and-stone paving, ringing even more loudly on the wooden planks of the tiny north bridge that crossed Splinter Creek. The rider halted briefly. Off to the left stood the charred ruins of the house of the dead vivisectionist, Kurd. Next to it, though, stood a new house, shoddily built from scavenged lumber and stones. Lamplight shone through the cracks of hastily constructed shut ters, and gruff voices echoed through the door. There was the smell of lime and sand about the place, and unfamiliar tools leaned against the outside walls. Some itinerant workers on the city's new fortifications probably had decided to stay, though the work was done.

Suddenly, the door swung open a crack, and someone peered around the edge, alerted, no doubt, by the hoof-sounds on the bridge. They watched warily as the rider passed by. Obviously, they had quickly learned the ways of this city, this thieves' world.

Off to the left stood the high, stark silhouettes of the city's granaries, barely discernible in the night, though they towered above the new wall. Nearer burned the lamps of the Street of Red Lanterns, where scented women plied special delights and special tortures, according to the appe tites of their customers and the weight of their coins. Special effort had been made to extend the new wall around the granaries, while the broth els were left outside in its shadow.
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The rider thought about that, then shrugged. In Sanctuary, one might have expected just the reverse.

After a massive construction effort that had been the talk of the Em pire, the new wall was finished. It encompassed the entire city now. Atop the huge edifice, watch fires burned, and shadows moved about in the flickering glow. The new, iron-banded doors of the great Gate of Tri umph stood open, but a pair of garrison sentries stood at the duty post just inside.

"Whoa, there!" one of them called, coming forward as he curled one hand almost casually about the hilt of his sword. "What kind of foreigner comes visiting our town at such an unholy hour? Come out from under that damned hood. Show your face there."

The sentry's hair and clothing exuded the odor of smoked krrf as he came as close as the rider's knee, and his eyes sheened with drug-glaze as they caught the torchlight from the duty post. His jaw hung just a bit too slackly, and his motions were languid. An addict, probably.

The rider wanted no confrontation, so pulled just a corner of the con

cealing hood back and glared at the sentry, who backed up immediately.
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"My apologies, Lady!" he mumbled. He took his hand quickly away from his sword's hilt, and shot a fearful glance at his partner. "We didn't know it was you. Of course, you can pass. Welcome home'" He made a deep bow, and the rider passed him by without a word.

Caravan Square was abandoned this time of night. So was the Farmer's Run, though one could never be too sure there, for it was too close to the Maze, and every shadow and dark cranny was to be watched. Governor's Walk was also quiet, and the sounds of the horse's hoof-falls cracked with uncomfortable volume on freshly repaired street cobbles. Even in the darkness the work on the smaller, inner wall that enclosed the palace was evident. The rider continued straight ahead, following that wall.

At the place where West Gate Street joined Governor's Walk, a city watch patrol, six uniformed men, suddenly blocked the way. The oldest of them, a man whose graying curls spilled out from under his steel cap, and apparently the captain, held up a lantern and shined it on the rider.