Robert Asprin - Soul of the City

Crit said, "Am I too late?" crooking one leg over his saddle and fishing in his pouch for the makings of a smoke. In Ischade's garden there was always a weird light and it underlit the line officer's face so that Strat couldn't tell what Crit was thinking. Not that he ever could.

Something inside him tensed. He said, because there had been no Sacred Band greeting between them, "Look, Crit. I don't know what you've heard or what you think, but she's not like that...."

"Isn't she? Still got your soul. Ace? Or wouldn't you know?" Crit's eyes were slitted and he fingered the crossbow hanging from his saddle.

Strat noticed that there was an arrow nocked, and that the bow would fire, from that position, straight into him at the click of a safety and the touch of a trigger. He tried to shrug away the suspicion he felt, but he couldn't. "You're here to save me from myself? She's the only reason we've survived here-the Band, the real Stepsons-while you and the Riddler have been upcountry playing your palace games. I'm not asking you where you've been. Don't ask me how I've spent my time. Unless, that is, you're ready to be reasonable."

"I can't. I haven't time. Riddler wants us to roust Roxane, get the Globe of Power and destroy it by sunup. Maybe your soul-sucking friend'll have a few ideas as to how to help us, if she likes you so well. If she does, maybe I'll let her live until you can explain. Otherwise..." Crit lit the smoke he'd rolled and the spark illumined a carefully arranged face that Straton knew wasn't one to argue with. "Otherwise, I'm going to bum her ass to a crisp and then do what I can to beat some sense back into you... partner. Before it's too late. So, you want to call her out? Or just come with me and we'll die like we're supposed to, shoulder to shoulder, fighting the Nisibisi witch."

Strat didn't have to call Ischade; she was beside him, somehow, though he hadn't heard the door open or seen light spill out and he didn't think Crit had, either.

She was so tiny in her cowl and long black cloak. He wanted to put an arm around her shoulder, dared not, then dared. "She's on our side, Crit. You've got to-"

"The hell I do," Crit said, and shifted his gaze to her. "I bet I don't have to explain one whit to you, honey. I just hope you're not too hungry to wait awhile. We've got something on that's just your style."

"Critias," said Ischade with more dignity than Strat would ever have, "we should talk. No one has been hurt, no one has to be. You come-"

"-to get my partner. We can leave it at that."

"And if he is unwilling to leave?"

"Doesn't have squat to do with it. I've got responsibilities; so does he, even if he's forgotten them. I'm here to remind him. As for you, we can use you. Come help out, and I'll let you have your say-later. Right now, I've got orders. So does he." Critias gestured to Strat, who looked at Ischade and could not, in front of Critias, plead with her for patience, for help, or even for his partner's life.

But Ischade didn't strike Crit dead, or mesmerize him. She nodded primly and said, "As you wish. Straton, take the bay horse. He'll serve you well in this. I'll ride your dun. And we'll give Critias what he wants-or what he thinks he wants." She turned then to Crit.

"And you, afterwards, will give me the courtesy of a hearing."

"Lady, if any of us can hear anything after sunrise, I'll be more than willing to listen," said Crit as Ischade raised a hand and Strat's dun trotted toward her.

Roxane had been waked abruptly from exhausted sleep when Niko lopped the head from her finest minion-she would miss the bodyguard snake. And Stealth would regret what he had done.

She'd paid a heavy price this evening; her thighs ached and her buttocks smarted as she got out of her bed and felt her way through the dark.

Her Foalside home was small sometimes, large at others. Tonight, it was cavernous with all the forces she'd disturbed.

She found her witching room and and sluiced the sweat from her body as she filled her scrying bowl herself.

Then, trembling with pain and fury, she spoke the spell to open the well that held the power globe, and another to summon a fiend of hers-the slave named Snapper Jo who spied for her in the Vulgar Unicorn where he tended bar.

Before the fiend arrived, she spoke her spell of utmost power and in the bowl she saw a fate she didn't understand.

Men were there, and the cursed Beysa, and a goddess called Mother Bey locked in love or hate with Jinan's terrible father, Stormbringer. And these two deities straddled the winter palace while, inside, Niko played with children and Tempus with the fates of men.

She trembled, seeing Tempus and Niko in one place-the very place where her surviving snake (more talented than most) slithered corridors in Beysib-snake disguise, biting and killing where he could.

Good. Good, she thought, and brought back Niko's face to the surface of her bowl. But this time, the vision was not of him alone. Over one of Niko's shoulders she could see the Riddler-or the Rankan Storm God, whose aspect was the same; over the other, a woman's face and that face was comely in an awful way-her own.

The meaning of it, remaining hidden, chilled her.

She could do only so much; she had certain words to say.

She said them and the dark witching room was lit with balefire. The light touched the globe in its hidey-hole of nothingness and the globe began to spin.

If there was some bond of fate between her and egregious Tempus, the thread must be cut. Even if it were Niko's life, she must do the deed. And the baby god could not be suffered to survive. Both children's lives and souls were promised to a certain demon of her recent, intimate acquaintance.

And the cold she felt, which raised gooseflesh on sanguine Nisi skin as smooth as velvet, which drew back lips as beautiful as any that had ever spoken death for men-that cold had to do with failing and winning, with perishing and surviving.

As the door to her outer chamber shivered from something scratching on its farther side, she decided.

She let the globe spin faster, let the colors from its stones bathe her in their light.

A rushing wind filled the scrying room and in its midst was a woman's form, changing shape.

Black mist spun around the comeliest of female guises. Black wizard hair grew long and covered limbs cut clean and meant to hypnotize any man. Her fine long nose grew chitinous, then hooked; her firm flesh sprouted feathers.

And by the time Snapper Jo, still wiping his claws on his barman's apron, thought he'd better open up the door himself, an eagle with a wingspan ten feet wide stood where Roxane was before.

And Snapper, her spy among the Sanctuary denizens, who tended bar at the Vulgar Unicorn, clacked prognathic jaws together and wrung his clawed and warty hands.

"Mistress," he gurgled in his fiendish, grating voice, "is that you?" His eyes that looked every which-way squinted at the eagle swathed in dusky light. He squatted down, gray gangly limbs akimbo in submission. "Roxane?" said the fiend again. "Call Snapper, did you? Here I be, for what? Some murder? Murder do, tonight?"

And the eagle cocked its head at him and let out a screech no fiend could misconstrue, then took wing and flapped by him, out the door, leaving him bleeding from a flesh wound made by claws much sharper than his own.

Muttering, "Damn and damn and murder damned," the fiend scuttled after her. Looking askance at her black shadow in the moonless sky. Snapper Jo chewed a long orange lock of hair in dark frustration. To be human was his wish; to be free of Roxane his hidden dream. But sometimes he thought he never would be free of her.

And the trouble was, at times like these, he didn't care. He was hungry as the night for blood; just the thought of carnage made him giddy.