Robert Asprin - Wings of Omen

"Well?" said Mor-am. "Well, do you just walk in and serve yourself?"

"No." There was always quiet in Haught. Always the downward glance, the bowed head: ex-slave. Moria remembered scars on his back and elsewhere, remembered other things, nights huddled beside a rough brick fireplace; bundled together beneath rough blankets; convulsed together in the only love there had been once. This too had changed. "She wants you to do that thing," Haught said, speaking to Mor-am. "Tonight." Sleight of hand produced a tiny packet and flung it to the table by the wine bottle.

"Tonight... .For Shalpa's sweet sake-"

"You'll find a way." Haught's eyes darted a quick, shy glance Mor-am's way, Moria's next, and flickered away again, somehow floorward: in such small ways he remained uncatchable. "It's very good, the wine."

"Damn you," Mor-am said with a tremor of his mouth. "Damn-"

"Hush," Moria said, "hush, Mor-am, don't." And to Haught: "There's food left-" It was reflex; there were times they had been hungry, she and Haught. They were not now, and she put on weight. She had drunk herself stupid then; and he had loved her when she had not loved herself. Now she was wise and sober and getting fat; and scared. "Won't you stay awhile?"

-Thinking of herself alone once Mor-am went out; and terrified; and wanting him this night (the servants she did not touch-her authority was scant enough; and they were crude). But Haught gave her that shy, cold smile that allied him with Her and ran his finger round the rim of the cup, never quite looking up.

"No," he said. He turned and walked away, into the dark hall. The door opened for him, swirling the dark cloak and whipping the candles into shadow.

"G-got to go," Mor-am said distractedly, "got to find my cloak, got to get Ero to go with me-gods, gods-"

The door closed, and sent the candles into fits.

"Ero!" Mor-am yelled.

Moria stood with her arms wrapped about herself, staring at nothing in particular.

It was another thing transmuted, like some malicious alchemy that left her strangling in wealth and utterly bereft. They lived uptown now, in Her house. And Haught was Hers too, like that dead man-Stilcho was his name-who shared Her bed-she was sure it was so. Perhaps Haught did, somehow and sorcerously immune to the curse attributed to Her. Mradhon Vis she had not seen since the morning he walked away. Perhaps Vis was dead. Perhaps the thing he feared most in all the world had happened and he had met Her in one of Her less generous moments.

"Ero!" Mor-am yelled, summoning his bodyguard, a thief of higher class.

The fire seemed inadequate, like the gold and the illusions that had become insane reality.

There was little traffic on the uptown street-the watcher at the gate, no more than that; and Haught walked the shadows, not alone from the habit of going unnoticed, but because in Sanctuary by night not to be noticed was always best; and in Sanctuary of late it was decidedly best. The houses here had barred windows, protecting Rankan nobles against unRankan pilferage, burglary, rapine, occasional murder at the hand of some startled thief; but nowadays there were other, political, visitors, stealthy in approach, leaving bloody results as public as might be.

It had begun with the hawkmasks and the Stepsons; with beggars and hawkmasks; priests and priests; and gods; and wizards; and nowadays murder crept uptown in small bands, to prove the cleverness of some small faction in reaching the unreachable; and striking the unstrikable; thus fomenting terror in the streets and convincing the terrorized that to join in bands was best, so that nowadays one went in Sanctuary with a mental map not alone of streets but of zones of allegiance and control, and planned to avoid certain places in certain sequences, not to be seen passing safely through a rival's territory.

Haught ignored most lines-by night. There were some foolhardy enough to touch him. Not many. He was accustomed to fear, and, truth, he felt less fear nowadays than previously. He was accustomed to horrors and that stood him in good stead.

He had been prenticed once, up by Wizardwall; and his last master had been gentle, for one of Wizardwall.

"Why do you stay?" his present teacher asked.

"Teach me," he had said that morning, with a yearning in him only the dance had halfway filled: he showed her the little magic that he had remembered. And she had smiled, had Ischade of no country at all: smiled in a very awful way. "Magus," she had said, "would you be?"

He had loved Moria at that time. Moria had been gentle with him when few had been. And he had thought (he tormented himself with the dread that it was not his thought at all, such were Ischade's powers) that it was well to please the witch, for Moria's sake. So he would protect Moria and himself: to be allied with power was safety. Experience had taught him that.

But deep in his heart he had seen that Ischade was nec-romant, not hieromant; that the lighting of candles and the stirring of winds were only tricks to her.

And he had breathed the wind and sensed the power, and he was snared for reasons that had nothing at all to do with love or gratitude, for he was Nisi and witchery was in his blood.

Tonight he walked the streets and crossed lines and no one dared touch him. And something cramped in him for years spread wings (but they were dark).

He might have lived in the uptown house.

But he took the other way.

The sound of the river was very close here, where the old stones thrust up through newly trampled brush. Squith shivered, blinked, caught something darker than the night itself in this place unequally posed between two houses on the river.

"Squith," a woman said.

He turned, his back to an upthrust stone.

"No respect?" she asked.

He took his hand from the stone as if he had remembered a serpent coiled thereby. Vashanka's. All these stones were; and he would not be here by any choice of his.

"Moruth-Moruth couldn't come. 'S got a c-cold."

"Has he?" The woman moved forward out of the dark, dark-robed, her face dusky and all but invisible in the overhang of sickly trees. "I might cure him."

Squith tumbled to his knees and shook his head; his bowels had gone to water. "S-sent me, he did. Respectful, he is. Squith, he says, Squith, you goes and tells the lady-"

"--What?"

"Me lord does what you wants."

"He may survive his cold. It's tonight, beggar."

"I go tell him, go tell him." Squith made it a litany, bobbed and held his gut and sucked wind past his snaggled row of teeth. He had a view of a cloak-hem, of brush; he kept it that way.

"Go."

He scrambled up, scrabbling past thorns. One tore his cheek, raked his sightless eye. He fled.

Ischade watched him, and forbore spells that would have urged him on his way. Roxane was at home tonight, not so far away. Thorns regrew. Snakes infested the place. Burned patches repaired themselves with preternatural speed.

A beggar sped toward the beggar-king Moruth. A black bird had landed in Downwind, on a certain sill. And Squith came. Moruth had a cold, and languished in mortal cowardice.

But Moruth had met something one night in a Downwind alleyway that mightily convinced him where his interests lay.

"Go to Roxane," she had whispered in Moruth's unwashed ear. "Go to Yorl, to whatever wizard you choose. I'll know. Or you can promise beggars they'll be safe on the streets again. At least from me. From other things, perhaps. Or at worst they'll be avenged. When a bird lights on your sill-come to Vashanka's altar on the Foal. You know the place."

A nod of a shaggy head. The beggar-king knew, and babbled oaths of compliancy.

Wings fluttered nearby. She glanced up where the dead branches overhead gave rest to other shadows, inky as her robes. A messenger returned.