Robert Asprin - Blood Ties

And then he realized why these uptown hotshots were down in Ratfall; Kama's father. Tempus's minions, all of these were, some by choice, some by duty, some by coercion. And none of them with a good word to say of Zip, except perhaps for the Riddler's daughter.

Fear sharpened his eyesight, and he looked beyond the gathered luminaries to their troops, and farther: to where his rebels skulked. None of them would move to save him-the odds weren't good enough.

And neither Ratfall nor Zip were worth saving, not at the kind of price the 3rd Commando would exact, if the sentry was a good example.

And he was. They'd made sure of that, had his visitors.

As he took deep breaths and resolved to tell nothing to this corps of fancy fighters (including the Stepsons' chief interrogator, Strat), Zip realized that something was indeed worth saving here: Behind the men, in the long shed against which 3rd Commando regulars leaned with studied insolence, was a store of incendiaries purchased from the Beysib glassmakers: bottles in which were alchemical concoctions that, once their wicks were lit and the bottles thrown, exploded with such force that the shards and flame and concussion from even one such bottle could clear a street-or a palace hall.

With or without him, the revolution could continue, as long as the Beysib glassblowers took the PFLS's money and Ilsig will-to-fight held out.

So, having determined that he had something to lose. Zip said again, "Talk, I said. What do you think this is, an uptown dinner party?"

"No," said the woman he didn't know, the one with the hawkish bird upon her shoulder, "it's a revolutionary council -a trial, actually: yours."

When Kama came back from Ratfall, her eyes were red-rimmed and she was so disarrayed that she ran up Molin's back stairs, hoping to have the girls draw her a bath so she could get the Zip-smell off her and the straw out of her hair before the Torch saw her.

But Molin was home: She could hear Torchholder's voice, and that of another Rankan, coming from the front rooms.

She froze in horror, realizing suddenly that she couldn't face him-not now, with her thighs sticky and her blood up, and all her father's heritage aroused in her so that she wanted nothing to do with the half-Rankan, half-Nisi who had saved her life, and whom she owed so much.

But was debt the same as love? Zip's faked and fated "trial" had broken her heart thrice over.

The outcome-the verdict of conditional acquittal-was assured, by Tempus's decree. Zip was the only one who hadn't known it.

It was the crudest thing she'd ever seen men do to another man, and she'd been a willing part of it, the operator in her fascinated by all she saw, by human emotion and its interplay, by the passions of those who'd lost loved ones, and face, trying to justify the one and regain the other-all because Kama's father had ridden down from Ranke, looked upon the doings of Sanctuary's puny mortals, and not been pleased.

Sometimes she hated Tempus more even than she hated the gods.

And so she'd stayed with Zip, after the others had left, to lick the nervous sweat from his fine young body and to wipe the confusion from his heart in the only way she knew.

Zip was... Zip, her aberration: a physical match such as Molin could never be. But that was all. She could never make it more, or let it make itself more, or let Zip convince her it could be more.

He needed help, that was all. And everyone was' using him, dangling him this way and that. She felt sorry for him.

So she gave him comfort in the night. It was nothing.

Yet the memory sent her bolting from Molin's doorstep, because the Torch was too intelligent to be fooled by mumbled excuses or headaches, because Kama just couldn't fake it tonight.

She roamed night-hot streets, though she knew better, almost hoping that some pickpocket or zombie or Beysib would accost her: Like her father, when pushed too hard, Kama craved only open violence. She'd have killed a Stepson or a 3rd Commando ranger, one of her own, if any dared cross her this evening.

She stopped in at the Unicorn, half-hoping for a fight, but no one paid attention to her there.

She wandered back streets on a borrowed horse, letting it drift barracks-ward, until she realized that it had brought her to the White Foal Bridge.

And then, as she gave the horse its head and it crossed the river bridge, she began in earnest to cry.

It was Crit she wanted now, whether to hold him or kill him, she couldn't have said if her life depended on it. But Crit was, as Zip would say, old business, and Crit had noticed that she'd stayed with Zip.

Maybe she'd stayed with Zip because of Crit, brushing hips with his partner, and because even that partner, Strat, had sought warmer company than Critias's Ischade for warmth that Crit reserved to formed ranks and duty squadrons and the next covert operation on his docket.

So when the sorrel string-horse ambled toward Ischade's funny little gate, as if by habit, Kama brushed her eyes angrily with her forearm and blinked away her tears.

In her nostrils was the rank smell of the White Foal in summer, carrying its carrion to the sea, and the perfume of night-blooming flowers of the occult sort that Ischade grew here.

And the smell of heated horse: Two were stamping, reins tied to Ischade's gate, and one of those was Grit's big black. She recognized it by the star and snip as it turned its head to whicker softly to the mount she rode.

The mare under her gave a belly-shaking acknowledgment and she realized that the horse she rode, and his, were lovers.

Hating herself for resenting even that, for her confusion and her doubts, she dismounted, trying not to think at all.

And walked up to the vampire-woman's gate, and pushed it with a sweaty palm.

Perhaps she was meeting her doom here-Ischade had no reason to cut Kama the kind of slack she allowed Straton, and Crit because of their pairbond, and Kama's father because of some bargain whose specifics Tempus had never revealed.

If Crit was in there, Kama wanted to see him. She focused on that and nothing else.

Love sucks, she told herself, and wondered what he'd say.

She'd knocked upon Ischade's door, which was lit somehow, though no torch gleamed or candle flickered in its lamp, before she'd thought of an excuse to give. She could always say she needed to debrief.

If he was there. If it wasn't a trap. If the necromant wasn't into women this summer.

Then the door opened and a small and dusky figure stepped out, closing it behind her so that Kama was forced to retreat a pace, then take a step down the stoop's stairs.

That put them eye to eye and the eyes of Ischade were deeper than Kama's hidden grief for a child lost long ago on the battlefield and the man who'd refused to give her another chance.

"Yes?" said the velvet-voiced woman who held Strat in thrall.

Kama, who was more woman than she'd have chosen, looked deep into the eyes of the woman who was all any man who'd seen her had ever dreamed of wanting, and felt rough, unkempt, foolish.

"Crit's horse... is it... ? Is he... ?"

"Here? The both. Kama, isn't it?" Ischade's dark eyes delved, narrowed just a fraction, then widened.

"It, I-I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry. I'll just go and..."

"There's no harm. And no peace, either," said the vampire-woman who seemed suddenly sad. "Not if your father has the say of it. You want him-Crit? Take care for what you want, little one."

And Kama, who had never known her mother and thought of other women as if she herself were a man, found her arms outstretched to Ischade for comfort, weeping freely, sobbing so deeply that nothing she tried to say came out in words.

But the necromant drew back with a hiss and a warding motion, a shake of her head and a blink that broke some spell or other.