Robert Asprin - Blood Ties

Tempus wondered, suddenly, whether it would matter to Jihan if she did know. She wasn't human, any more than Ischade, so slight and yet so full of menace, or Roxane.

Jihan was still learning how to be alive; womanhood lay heavy and confusing on her, as it didn't on the witches and the accursed women who fought the witches of blood.

Ischade, no bigger than a child to Tempus, came striding up swathed in black,

her face like a magical moon on midsummer's eve, her eyes wide as the hells she guarded.

"Riddler," she breathed, "are you sure?"

"Never," he chuckled. "Not about anything."

And he saw the necromant draw back, sensing the god cohabiting with him, a god the fighters called Lord Storm, whose name had been translated into more languages than the thieves' world knew, but always meant the same: the nature of man to fight and kill for lust and territory. On bad days, Tempus thought that the god who dogged him, chameleonlike, adapting by syncretism to different wars in different lands, was merely an excuse his mind made up-a way to hang his excesses and his sins on others, a faceless repository for all the blame of every death he'd caused.

But seeing Ischade's reaction to the god high in him made him realize it wasn't so.

The necromant took a step forward resolutely, cocked her head, licked her lips, and said, "You jest with me? When He is here?" Then, when he didn't respond, she made a warding sign, withdrawing with a mutter: "Have your witch loosed, then. There's less trouble over there than is right here, with you."

And my fighter, Strat? he or the god wanted to ask, but did not. You didn't ask Ischade, you negotiated. Tempus wasn't in a position to negotiate, right now. Unless ...

"Ischade, wait," he called. Or the god did. And when she came close, he leaned down and let the Lord of Rape and Pillage whisper in the ear of the necromant who commanded all the partly dead and restless dead who never went to Sanctuary's gods.

He tried not to listen to what the god said or what the necromant replied, but it was a bargain they made which concerned him-concerned the flesh of his flesh, and the soul of his Stepson, Strat.

When he straightened up, the frail, pale creature touched his forearm and looked into his eyes. For a moment he thought he saw a tear there, but then decided it was the brightness that passion lent to necromants and their kind.

He could survive what the god had promised Ischade-or at least he thought he could.

It might be interesting to find out... if, of course, Stonn-bringer didn't kick his ass from one dimension to another for meddling in the Froth Daughter's affairs before he had time to make good his promise to spend a night with the necromant.

Disconcerted, as Ischade disappeared-literally-into shadows, he mounted the Tros and stroked its neck for comfort: his comfort, not its. .

Up north, at the Hidden Valley stud farm, a calmer life still beckoned. If he could only be content to do it, he could raise horses and a new generation of fighters to hold the line against the northern wizards with his friend Bashir.

But no matter how he craved a different life at times like these, when battle lines of uncertain composition were drawn, with stakes not so simple as life or death, and opponents whose strength was not corporeal, the god would never let him rest.

Torchholder, the half-Nisi priest, had told him all his curse and godbond were merely habit. It might have been true on the day the priest said it, or true to a priestly eye; but it wasn't true here and now.

And here and now was always where Tempus was, not off somewhere in the realm of Greater Good or Mortal Soul or Eternal Consequence. He'd lost the ability to determine greater good, if there was one; his mortal soul he'd given up on long ago. And as for eternal consequence-he was its embodiment.

So when Jihan finally made her entrance, glowing softly to his god-shared eye, her muscular, lithe form still more feminine than any mortal girl's, her waist too small and breasts too pert and thighs too sleek below scale-armor no human hand had forged, he was more than ready to be just what he was, to lay upon her the consequence of her dalliance, of her games, and of her fate.

She came up to within an arm's length of the Tros and it backed a pace: It remembered the way she used to curry it until its hide showed bare of hair.

He slipped off its back as her throaty voice, arch and full of childish vanity, said, "You wished to see me, Tempus? I can't imagine why. I did not invite you to my wedding."

"Because," he said, reaching out for her with a quick grab and a step forward, "there isn't going to be one."

His hand closed on her arm as hers grabbed for his belt.

They struggled there, and he dropped her by thrusting a leg between her thighs and kicking her balance out from under her.

It was a signal.

As Jihan began to curse and rage and kick beneath him among the charcoal and the bricks, Critias and Strat and Ran-dal began the sacrifice of ox and oil, to pacify the god, while Ischade did whatever Ischade must do to release her wards.

Raping the Froth Daughter wasn't easy: She was as strong as he and just as agile.

He had counted on the lust they shared and the play-rapes in their past to turn her pique into passion and her body into an instrument he could play for best result.

And something of the sort transpired, though who raped whom, he wasn't certain, when they rolled half-naked in the ruins, unconcerned with anything about them, while a witch cast spells and soldiers spoke ancient rituals and Randal, the Tysian wizard, presided over a fiery sacrifice meant to set whatever lurked in Tasfalen's free at last.

Since Tempus was, in his way, that self-same sacrifice to Stonnbringer, father of Jihan, and since Jihan's legs were around him and her teeth sunk firmly in his neck, and since the god within him loved the rape-game and Jihan as well and since Jihan was by then wreaking enough havoc upon his flesh to make him glad the god was in him to bear the brunt of it, he missed the spectacle taking place across the street at Tasfalen's.

As a matter of fact, the fireworks inside his head as the god and he and Jihan and her father came together blotted out the simulacrum of last winter's pillar of fire, rising up to heaven from Tasfalen's home, which had been left unscathed then.

He was later told that, as it rose, the doors and windows of Tasfalen's flew open of their own accord and something fiery -something with huge bird's wings flew out. And flapped and circled high above the place where Tasfalen lived.

And disappeared into the smoke which billowed everywhere-too much smoke to credit to burned ox thighs and jugs of oil; smoke that went up from, or down to, the chimney of Tasfalen's house, as if the light spewing from every window was the light of something burning bright within.

But what burned in Tempus was a light unto itself.

Jihan was his match in all things physical: When they lay quiet, able to hear more than their own breathing and see more than their own souls, she whispered to him, with her head buried in his neck, "Oh, Riddler, what took you so long to come and reclaim me? How could you do this to me? And to Randal?"

"I'll take care of Randal. He'll understand. I want you, Jihan-I want you with me. I..." This was hard to say, but he had to say it, not just for Randal's sake, but for the sakes of all who put their faith in him. "I... need you, Jihan. We all do. Come north and east and everywhere with me-see this world, not just its armpit."

"But my father..." The Froth Daughter's eyes glowed red as the light he was just beginning to notice from across the street.

"Will he not honor his daughter's wish?"

And Jihan's arms locked around his neck in a grip not Tempus, or death itself, could brezk, and she pulled him down to her. "Then, Riddler, let us show Him that it is my wish."