Robert Asprin - Blood Ties

This, too, was part of being human: caring about little stamped circles of copper, gold, or silver, even though their value was only as great as the demand of the humans who fought and died over them.

But this big human wanted only information: He'd come to Snapper to consult.

The stranger said, while around him the bar cleared for a man's length on either side and behind him certain patrons skulked out into the storm and two serving wenches tiptoed into the back room, "I need to know of your former mistress -did Roxane ever find her way out of Tasfalen's house uptown? Has anyone seen her? You, of all... persons ... would know if she's about."

"No, friend," said Snapper, who used the word friend too much because he'd just recently learned its meaning, "she's not been seen or heard from since the pillar of fire was doused."

The big man nodded and leaned close across the bar.

Snapper leaned in to meet him, feeling somehow special and very favored to be having this conversation with so formidable a human before all the patrons in the Unicorn. Nearly nose to nose, he began to notice, through his right-looking eye, some things about the man which were naggingly familiar: the hooded, narrow eyes that watched him with hot intensity, the thin slash of a mouth whose lips twisted with some private humor.

Then the man said, "And Ischade, the vampire woman-is she well? Down at Shambles Cross? Holding court among her shades?"

"She..." Then memory jogged memory, and Snapper Jo raised a crop of goose bumps to complement his warts: This was the Sleepless One, the legendary fighter his former mistress had fought so long. "She... is, sire. Ischade... is. And will be, always...."

Snapper Jo had friends among the not-really-human, the once-dead, the straddlers of the void. Ischade was not one of them, but neither was this man, whom he now knew.

As he knew why the crowd had drawn back, this rabble who knew the players in a game they joined only as pawns and never of their own accord.

Snapper tried not to cringe, but his lips formed words involuntarily, words that whistled out sing-sing, "Mur-der, murder, oh there'll be mur-der everywhere and Snapper's so happy without it...."

"When next a Stepson or Commando comes in, instruct him to seek me at the mercenaries' hostel. And don't fail." The man called Tempus lay coins upon the bar.

Snapper could see them glitter with his left-looking eye, but he didn't pick them up until the big man had gone, leaving behind only creaking floorboards stained ruddy to prove he'd been there at all.

Then the fiend called one of the serving wenches from the kitchen and gave the girl, whom he loved-to the extent that a fiend can love-all the money the Riddler had left him, saying, "See, fear not. Snapper protect you. Snapper take care you. You take care Snapper, too, yes, later?" And the fiend gave a broad and lascivious grin to the woman he favored, who hid her shudder as she pocketed the equivalent of a week's wages and promised the fiend she'd warm his lonely night.

Things were tough enough, these days in Sanctuary, that you took what you could get.

"You want us to what?" Crit's disbelieving snort made Tempus frown.

For Tempus, the mercenaries' hostel north of town evoked memories and ghosts as bloody as the rufous walls here, hung with weapons which had won so many days. Here, Tempus and Crit had plotted to flush a witch without thought to the consequences; here, before Crit's recruitment, Tempus had put together the core of the Stepsons and taken command of Abarsis the Slaughter Priest's Sacred Band.

Here, even farther in the past, he'd burned a scarf belonging to a woman who was his most foul curse-a scarf that had been returned to him, magically whole and full of portent; a scarf he wore again around his waist, under his armor and his chiton, as if all between his first days in Sanctuary and the present were but a bad dream.

"I want you to protect, not hunt, this Zip, for one week," Tempus repeated, then added: "If, at the end of that week, there's no cease-fire coalition, no improvement, you can go back to collecting blood-debts."

Crit was the brightest of the- Stepsons, a Syrese fighter who'd taken the Sacred Band oath more than once and was now paired with Straton, who in turn was entangled with Ischade, the vampire woman who lived down by Shambles Cross.

No one wanted the Sacred Band out of Sanctuary more than Crit. And no one knew Tempus's heart better, or the specifics of what had transpired while the Emperor was in Sanctuary.

Crit pulled on his long nose and stirred his posset with a finger, staring into it as if it were a witch's scrying bowl. "You're not. .." he said to the bowl, then looked up at Tempus. "You're not thinking about using that bunch of Zip's as some sort of Sanctuary defense force? Tell me you're not."

"I can't tell you that. Why should I? They're trained, gods know-well enough for this town, anyway. And they're tough-as tough as any we trained ought to be, which most of them are. Niko himself spent some time working with the PFLS leader. And it shouldn't matter to you who we leave in the barracks, as long as it's not Jubal. We can't have crime-lords running things-Theron was very explicit. It'll take locals to police this place, or us."

"That's what I mean: None of us will want to stay to oversee that bunch of murderers-not me, not any of mine. Promise me you won't do that to me again, leave me with an impossible job and an intractable lot of disappointed fighters. The Band wants to go with you. I won't be able to hold them here. And Sync's commandos won't take my orders."

It wasn't like Crit to make excuses, so these weren't excuses: These were points the Sacred Bander urgently wanted Tempus to consider.

"Fine. I agree. I just want to make sure that you understand that Zip is more useful alive than dead... for one week. And that whatever is between you and my daughter-or not," Tempus held up his hand to forestall Crit's denial, "she's entangled with Torchholder, who's Nisi-an enemy. We leave her here. We take Jihan and Randal if we have to drug them senseless to do it, and we get our tails out of here-yours, mine, Strat's, the Stepsons', the Third's-and that's that. We're clear of a degenerating situation. If we can leave some force or other to help Kadakithis, then we're lily-white."

"That's why you came here in person? To cobble together some stopgap that won't hold because Theron doesn't want it to? You know what he wants... he wants a tractable, stable Empire's anus. And with the magic screwed up, or downgraded, or whatever it is Randal's been trying to explain to me, he can get it by force of arms. I don't see a winning side for us in that kind of fight, and neither do you ... I hope."

Tempus grinned fondly at his second-in-command: "Get Straton disentangled, both from the witch and from his local responsibilities, and-on my explicit order-the two of you personally see that Zip manages to make his contacts. And that none of ours, the Third included, obstructs him. Then we're out of here, back to the capital with the best possible report under the circumstances. And, no, I didn't come down-country for this-I came down for Jihan's wedding: to stop it."

Randal was in the Mageguild, consorting with the nameless First Hazard, trying to make some headway casting a simple manipulative spell to turn the swampy ground between the complex's outer and inner walls to gardens, when Tempus came to call.

The First Hazard was harried, a Rankan of Randal's age who'd assumed the dignity just when it no longer was one: The Mageguild had held the populace in thrall by fear and power for time uncounted. Now that the Nisibisi power globes' destruction had made simple spells uncastable and love potions useless, now that sympathetic magic was no longer so, the Mageguild adepts feared not merely for their income.