Robert Asprin: The Face of Chaos

The smith's keen eyes shifted; he rubbed his smile with a greasy hand. 'Aye, and that's the truth. And for you. Lord Tempus? We've the new hard-steel, though why they're all so hot to pay twice the price when men're soft as clay and even wood will pierce the boldest belly, I can't say.'

'No steel, just a case of iron-tipped short-flights, when you can.'

'I'll select them myself. Come and watch them, now? We'll see what their nerve's like, if you call score ...'

'A moment or two. Marc. Go back to your work, I'll sniff around on my own.'

And so he approached Niko, on pretence of admiring the Stepson's new bow, and saw the shadowed eyes, blank as ever but veiled like the beginning beard that masked his jaw: 'How goes it, Niko? Has your maat returned to you?'

'Not likely,' the young fighter, cranking the spring and lever so a bolt notched, said and triggered the quarrel which whispered straight and true to centre his target. 'Did Crit send you? I'm fine, commander. He worries too much. We can handle her, no matter how it seems. It's just time we need ... she's suspicious, wants us to prove our faith. Shall I, by whatever means?'

'Another week on this is all I can give you. Use discretion, your judgment's fine with me. What you think she's worth, she's worth. If Critias questions that, your orders came from me and you may tell him so.'

'I will, and with pleasure. I'm not his to wetnurse; he can't keep that in his head.'

'And Janni?'

'It's hard on him, pretending to be ... what we're pretending to be. The men talk to him about coming back out to the barracks, about forgetting what's past and resuming his duties. But we'll weather it. He's man enough.'

Niko's hazel eyes flicked back and forth, judging the other men: who watched; who pretended he did not, but listened hard. He loosed another bolt, a third, and said quietly that he had to collect his flights. Tempus eased away, heard the range officer call 'Clear' and watched Niko go retrieve his grouped quarrels.

If this one could not breach the witch's defences, then she was unbreachable.

Content, he left then, and found Jihan, his de facto right-side partner, waiting astride his other Tros horse, her more than human strength and beauty brightening Smith Street's ramshackle facade as if real gold lay beside fool's gold in a dusty pan.

Though one of the matters estranging him from his Stepsons was his pairing with this foreign 'woman', only Niko knew her to be the daughter of a power who spawned all contentious gods and even the concept of divinity; he felt the cool her flesh gave off, cutting the midday heat like wind from a snowcapped peak.

'Life to you, Tempus.' Her voice was thick as ale, and he realized he was thirsty. Promise Park and the Alekeep, an east-side establishment considered upper class by those who could tell classes of Ilsigs, were right around the corner, a block up the Street of Gold from where they met. He proposed to take her there for lunch. She was delighted - all things mortal were new to her; the whole business of being in flesh and attending to it was yet novel. A novice at life, Jihan was hungry for the whole of it.

For him, she served a special purpose: her loveplay was rough and her constitution hardier than his Tros horses - he could not couple gently; with her, he did not inflict permanent harm on his partner; she was bom of violence inchoate and savoured what would kill or cripple mortals.

At the Alekeep, they were welcome. They talked in a back and private room of the god's absence and what could be made of it and the owner served them himself, an avuncular sort still grateful that Tempus's men had kept his daughters safe when wizard weather roamed the streets. 'My girl's graduating school today. Lord Marshal - my youngest. We've a fete set and you and your companion would be most welcome guests.'

Jihan touched his arm as he began to decline, her stormy eyes flecked red and glowing.

'... ah, perhaps we will drop by, then, if business permits.'

But they didn't, having found pressing matters of lust to attend to, and all things that happened then might have been avoided if they hadn't been out of touch with the Stepsons, unreachable down by the creek that ran north of the barracks when sorcery met machination and all things went awry.

On their way to work, Niko and Janni stopped at the Vulgar Unicorn to wait for the moon to rise. The moon would be full this evening, a blessing since anonymous death squads roamed the town -whether they were Rankan army regulars, Jubal's scattered hawk-masks, fish-eyed Beysib spoilers, or Nisibisi assassins, none could say.

The one thing that could be said of them for certain was that they weren't Stepsons or Sacred Banders or nonaligned mercenaries from the guild hostel. But there was no convincing the terrorized populace of that.

And Niko and Janni - under the guise of disaffected mercenaries who had quit the Stepsons, been thrown out of the guild hostel for unspeakable acts, and were currently degenerating Sanctuary-style in the filthy streets of the town thought that they were close to identifying the death squads' leader. Hopefully, this evening or the next, they would be asked to join the murderers in their squalid sport. '

Not that murder was uncommon in Sanctuary, or squalor. The Maze, now that Niko knew it like his horses' needs or Janni's limits, was not the town's true nadir, only the multi-tiered slum's upper echelon. Worse than the Maze was Shambles Cross, filled with the weak and the meek; worse than the Shambles was Downwind, where nothing moved in the light of day and at night hellish sounds rode the stench on the prevailing east wind across the White Foal. A tri-level hell, then, filled with murderers, sold souls and succubi, began here in the Maze.

If the death squads had confined themselves to Maze, Shambles, and Downwind, no one would have known about them. Bodies in those streets were nothing new; neither Stepsons nor Rankan soldiers bothered counting them; near the slaughterhouses cheap crematoriums flourished; for those too poor even for that, there was the White Foal, taking ambiguous dross to the sea without complaint. But the squads ventured uptown, to the east side and the centre of Sanctuary itself where the palace hierophants and the merchants lived and looked away from downtown, scented pomanders to their noses.

The Unicorn crowd no longer turned quiet when Niko and Janni entered; their scruffy faces and shabby gear and bleary eyes proclaimed them no threat to the mendicants or the whores. Competition, they were now considered, and it had been hard to float the legend, harder to live it. Or to live it down, since none of the Stepsons but their task force leader, Crit (who himself had never moved among the barracks ranks, proud and shining with oil and fine weapons and finer ideals) knew that they had not quit but only worked shrouded in subterfuge on Tempus's orders to flush the Nisibisi witch.

But the emergence of the death squads had raised the pitch, the ante, given the matter a new urgency. Some said it was because Shadowspawn, the thief, was right: the god Vashanka had died and the Rankans would suffer their due. Their due or not, traders, politicians, and moneylenders - the 'oppressors' - were nightly dragged out into the streets, whole families slaughtered or burned alive in their houses, or hacked to pieces in their festooned wagons.

The agents ordered draughts from One-Thumb's new girl and she came back, cowering but determined, saying that One-Thumb must see their money first. They had started this venture with the barman's help; he knew their provenance; they knew his secret.

'Let's kill the swillmonger. Stealth,' Janni growled. They had little cash - a few soldats and some Machadi coppers - and couldn't draw their pay until their work was done.