Robert Asprin - The Face of Chaos

She gave a name and Tamzen, her sense swimming in drugs and her heart filled with relief and the sweet taste of salvation, lied and said she did. All six went along with the woman, skirting the square until they came to a curious house behind a high gate, well lit and gardened and full of chaotic splendour. At its rear, the rush of the White Foal could be heard.

'Now sit, sit, little ones. Who needs to wash off the street grime? Who needs a pot?' The rooms were shadowed, no longer well lit; the woman's eyes were comforting, calming like sedative draughts for sleepless nights. They sat among the silks and the carven chairs and they drank what she offered and began to giggle. Phryne went and washed, and her sister and Tamzen followed. When they came back, the boys were nowhere in sight. Tamzen was just going to ask about that when the woman offered fruit, and somehow she forgot the words on her tongue-tip, and even that the boys had been there at all, so fine was the krrf the woman smoked with them. She knew she'd remember in a bit, though, whatever it was she'd forgot...

When Crit and Straton arrived with the hawkmask they'd captured at the Foalside home of Ischade, the vampire woman, all its lights were on, it seemed, yet little of that radiance cut the gloom.

'By the god's four mouths, Crit, I still don't understand why you let those others go. And for Niko. What - ?'

'Don't ask me, Straton, what his reasons are; I don't know. Something about the one being of that Successors band, revolutionaries who want Wizardwall back from the Nisibisi mages -there's more to Nisibis than the warlocks. If that Vis was one, then he's an outlaw as far as Nisibisi law goes, and maybe a fighter. So we let him go, do him a favour, see if maybe he'll come to us, do us a service in his turn. But as for the other - you saw Ischade's writ of freedom - we gave him to her and she let him go. If we want to use her ... if she'll ever help us find Jubal - and she does know where he is; this freeing of the slave was a message; she's telling us we've got to up the ante - we've got to honour her wishes as far as this slave-bait goes.'

'But this ... coming here ourselves^. You know what she can do to a man ...'

'Maybe we'll like it; maybe it's time to die. I don't know. I do know we can't leave it to the garrison - every time they find us a hawkmask he's too damaged to tell us anything. We'll never recruit what's left of them if the army keeps killing them slowly and we take the blame. And also,' Crit paused, dismounted his horse, pulled the trussed and gagged hawkmask he had slung over his saddle like a haunch of meat down after him, so that the prisoner fell heavily to the ground, 'we've been told by the garrison's intelligence liaison that the army thinks Stepsons fear this woman.'

'Anybody with a dram of common sense would.' Straton, rubbing his eyes, dismounted also, notched crossbow held at the ready as soon as his feet touched the ground.

'They don't mean that. You know what they mean; they can't tell a Sacred Bander from a straight mercenary. They think we're all sodomizers and sneer at us for that.'

'Let 'em. I'd rather be alive and misunderstood than dead and respected.' Straton blinked, trying to clear his blurred vision. It was remarkable that Critias would undertake this action on his own; he wasn't supposed to take part in field actions, but command them. Tempus had been to see him, though, and since then the task force leader had been more taciturn and even more impatient than usual. Straton knew there was no use in arguing with Critias, but he was one of the few who could claim the privilege of voicing his opinion to the leader, even when they disagreed.

They'd interrogated the hawkmask briefly; it didn't take long; Straton was a specialist in exactly that. He was a pretty one, and substantively undamaged. The vampire was discerning, loved beauty; she'd take to this one, the few bruises on him might well make him more attractive to a creature such as she: not only would she have him in her power but it would be in her power to save him from a much worse death than that she'd give. By the look of the tall, lithe hawkmask, by his clothes and his pinched face in which sensitive, liquid eyes roamed furtively, a pleasant death would be welcome. His ilk were hunted by more factions in Sanctuary than any but Nisibisi spies. Crit said, 'Ready, Strat?'

'I own I'm not, but I'll pretend if you do. If you get through this and I don't, my horses are yours.'

'And mine, yours.' Crit bared his teeth. 'But I don't expect that to happen. She's reasonable, I'm wagering. She couldn't have turned that slave loose that way if she wasn't in control other lust. And she's smart - smarter than Kadakithis's so-called "intelligence staff, or Hell Hounds, we've seen that for a fact.'

So, despite sane cautions, they unlatched the gate, their horses drop-tied behind them, cut the hawkmask's ankle bonds and walked him to the door. His eyes went wide above his gag, pupils gigantic in the torchlight on her threshold, then squeezed shut as Ischade herself came to greet them when, after knocking thrice and waiting long, they were about to turn away, convinced she wasn't home after all.

She looked them up and down, her eyes half-lidded. Straton, for once, was grateful for the shimmer in his vision, the blur he couldn't blink away. The hawkmask shivered and lurched backwards in their grasp as Crit spoke first: 'Good evening, madam. We thought the time had come to meet, face to face. We've brought you this gift, a token of our good will.' He spoke blandly, matter-of factly, letting her know they knew all about her and didn't really care what she did to the unwary or the unfortunate. Straton's mouth dried and his tongue stuck to the roof of it. None was colder than Crit, or more tenacious when work was under way.

The woman, Ischade, dusky-skinned but not the ruddy tone of Nisibis, an olive cast that made the whites other teeth and eyes very bright, bade them enter. 'Bring him in, then, and we'll see what can be seen.'

'No, no. We'll leave him - an article of faith. We'd like to know what you hear of Jubal, or his band - whereabouts, that sort of thing. If you come to think of any such information, you can find me at the mercenaries' hostel.'

'Or in your hidey-hole in Shambles Cross?'

'Sometimes.' Crit stood firm. Straton, his relief a flood, now that he knew they weren't going in there, gave the hawkmask a shove. 'Go on, boy, go to your mistress.'

'A slave, then, is this one?' she asked Strat and that glance chilled his soul when it fixed on him. He'd seen butchers look at sheep like that. He half expected her to reach out and tweak his biceps.

He said: 'What you wish, he is.'

She said: 'And you?'

Crit said: 'Forbearance has its limits.'

She replied: 'Yours, perhaps, not mine. Take him with you; I want him not. What you Stepsons think of me, I shall not even ask. But cheap I shall never come.'

Crit loosed his hold on the youth, who wriggled then, but Straton held him, thinking that Ischade was without doubt the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, and the hawkmask was luckier than most. If death was the gateway to heaven, she was the sort of gatekeep he'd like to admit him, when his time came.

She remarked, though he had not spoken aloud, that such could easily be arranged.

Crit, at that, looked between them, then shook his head. 'Go wait with the horses, Straton. I thought I heard them, just now.'

So Straton never did find out exactly what was - or was not - arranged between his task force leader and the vampire woman, but when he reached the horses, he had his hands full calming them, as if his own had scented Niko's black, whom his grey detested above all other studs. When they'd both been stabled in the same barn, the din had been terrible, and stallboards shattered as regularly as stalls were mucked, from those two trying to get at each other. Horses, like men, love .and hate, and those two stallions wanted a piece of each other the way Strat wanted a chance at the garrison commander or Vashanka at the Wrigglies' Ils.