Robert Asprin: The Face of Chaos

The party from the boat advanced down the pier to the shore; then, rather than proceed into town, it had simply drawn up in a tight knot and waited. As minutes stretched on and no additional boats were dispatched from the fleet, it became apparent that this vanguard was expecting to be met by a delegation from the town. If that were truly the case, it occurred to Hakiem that they might well still be waiting at sunrise.

'You'll have to go to the palace!' he had called without thinking.

At the sound of his voice, the party had turned their glassy-eyed stares on him.

'Palace! Go Palace!' he repeated, ignoring the prickling at the nape of his neck.

'Hakiem!'

A figure in the group had beckoned him forward.

Of all things he had anticipated or feared about the invaders, the last thing Hakiem had expected was to be hailed by name.

Almost of their own volition, his legs propelled him shakily towards the group.

'The first one I met was the one I least expected,' Hakiem confided to his audience. 'None other than our own Hort, whom we all believed to be lost at sea, along with his father. To say the least, I was astonished to find him not only among the living, but accompanying these invaders.'

'By now you all have not only seen the Beysib, but have all grown accustomed to their strange appearance. Coming on them for the first time by torchlight on a deserted pier as I did, though, was enough to panic a strong man ... and I am not a strong man. The hands holding the torches were webbed, as if they had come out of the sea rather than across it. The handles of the warriors' swords jutting up from behind their shoulders I had seen from afar, but what I hadn't noted was their eyes. Those dark, unblinking eyes staring at me with the torchlight reflecting in their depths nearly had me convinced that they would pounce on me like a pack of animals if I showed my fear. Even now, by daylight those eyes can ...'

'Hakiem!'

The storyteller was pleased to note that he was not the only one who started at the sudden cry. He had not lost his touch for drawing an audience into a story. They had forgotten the morning glare and were standing with him on a torchlit pier.

Fast behind his pride, or perhaps overlapping it, was a wave of anger at having been interrupted in mid-tale. It was not a kindly gaze he turned on the interloper.

It was none other than Hort, flanked by two Beysib warriors. For a moment Hakiem had to fight off a wave of unreality, as if the youth had stepped out of the story to confront him in life.

'Hakiem! You must come at once. The Beysa herself wishes to see you.'

'She'll have to wait,' the storyteller declared haughtily, ignoring the murmurs that had sprung up among his audience, 'I'm in the middle of a story.'

'But you don't understand,' Hort insisted, 'she wants to offer you a position in her court!'

'No, you don't understand,' Hakiem flared back, swelling in his anger without rising from his seat. 'I already am employed ... and will be employed until this story is done. These good people have commissioned me to entertain them and I intend to do just that until they are satisfied. You and your fish-eyed friends there will just have to wait.'

With that, Hakiem returned his attention to his audience, ignoring Hort's discomfiture. The fact that he had not really wished to start this particular session was unimportant, as was the fact that service with the leader of the Beysib government-in-exile would undoubtedly be lucrative. Any storyteller, much less Sanctuary's best storyteller, did not shirk his professional duty in the midst of a tale, however tempting the counter-offer might be.

Gone were the days when he would scuttle off as soon as a few coins were tossed his way. The old storyteller's pride had grown along with his wealth, and Hakiem was no more exempt than any other citizen of Sanctuary from the effects of the Face of Chaos.

Just south of Caravan Square and the bridge over the White Foal River, the Nisibisi witch had settled in. She had leased the isolated complex - one three storied 'manor house' and its outbuildings -as much because its grounds extended to the White Foal's edge (rivers covered a multitude of disposal problems) as for its proximity to her business interests in the Wideway warehouse district and its convenience to her caravan master, who must visit the Square at all hours.

The caravan disguised their operations. The drugs they'd smuggled in were no more pertinent to her purposes than the dilapidated manor at the end of the bridge's south-running cart track or the goods her men bought and stored in Wideway's most pilferproof holds, though they lubricated her dealings with the locals and eased her troubled nights. It was all subterfuge, a web of lies, plausible lesser evils to which she could own if the Rankan army caught her, or the palace marshal Tempus's Stepsons (mercenary shock troops and 'special agents') rousted her minions and flunkies or even brought her up on charges.

Lately, a pair of Stepsons had been her particular concern. And Jagat - her first lieutenant in espionage - was no less worried. Even their Ilsig contact, the unflappable Lastel who had lived a dozen years in Sanctuary, cesspool of the Rankan empire into which all lesser sewers fed, and managed all that time to keep his dual identity as east-side entrepreneur and Maze-dwelling barman uncom promised, was distressed by the attentions the pair of Stepsons were payin her.

She had thought her allies overcautious at first, when it seemed she would be here only long enough to see to the 'death' of the Rankan war god, Vashanka. Discrediting the state-cult's power icon was the purpose for which the Nisibisi witch, Roxane, had come down from Wizardwall's fastness, down from her shrouded keep of black marble on its unscalable peak, down among the mortal and the damned. They were all in this together: the mages of Nisibisi; Lacan Ajami (warlord ofMygdon and the known world north of .Wizardwall) with whom they had made pact; and the whole Mygdonian Alliance which he controlled.

Or so her lord and love had explained it when he decreed that Roxane must come. She had not argued - one pays one's way among sorcerers; she had not worked hard for a decade nor faced danger in twice as long. And if one did not serve Mygdon - only one - all would suffer. The Alliance was too strong to thwart. So she was here, drawn here with others fit for better, as if some power more than magical was whipping up a tropical storm to cleanse the land and using them to gild its eye.

She should have been home by now; she would have been, but for the hundred ships from Beysib which had come to port and skewed all plans. Word had come from Mygdon, capital of Mygdonia, through the Nisibisi network, that she must stay.

And so it had become crucial that the Stepsons who sniffed round her skirts be kept at bay - or ensnared, or bought, or enslaved. Or, if not, destroyed. But carefully, so carefully. For Tempus, who had been her enemy three decades ago when he fought the Defender's Wars on Wizardwall's steppes, was a dozen Storm Gods' avatar; no army he sanctified could know defeat; no war he fought could not be won. Combat was life to him; he fought like the gods themselves, like an entelechy from a higher sphere -and even had friends among those powers not corporeal or vulnerable to sortilege of the quotidian sort a human might employ.

And now it was being decreed in Mygdonia's tents that he must be removed from the field - taken out of play in this southern theatre, manoeuvred north where the warlocks could neutralize him. Such was the word her lover-lord had sent her: move him north, or make him impotent where he stayed. The god he served here had been easier to rout. But she doubted that would incapacitate him; there were other Storm Gods, and Tempus, who under a score of names had fought in more dimensions than she had ever visited, knew them all. Vashanka's denouement might scare the Rankans and give the Ilsigs hope, but more than rumours and manipulation of theomachy by even the finest witch would be needed to make Tempus fold his hands or bow his head. To make him run, then, was an impossibility. To lure him north, she hoped, was not. For this was no place for Roxane. Her nose was offended by the stench which blew east from Downwind and north from Fisherman's Row and west from the Maze and south from either the slaughterhouses or the palace - she'd not decided which.