Robert Asprin - Blood Ties

Literally now, his blood was on her hand.

She rose, trying to wipe her fingers clean on her armor. "Take him," she said to Walegrin, "and say this to Kadakithis and Shupansea"-she looked at Zip's quiet face as she spoke, almost as if her words were meant for him-"that Zip is my peace offering to them and to this city. I will feud with the Beysa no more, but it's they who must pull the factions of Sanctuary into one unified whole." She hesitated, swallowed, went on. "Say also that they cannot do this from behind the palace walls. It's time for them to come out into the midst of their people and lead as leaders should."

She looked away from Zip's face and surveyed the courtyard. The dead were being arranged in separate groups: those that could still be recognized, those that could not. The stench of scorched flesh permeated the air. Her gladiators worked beside the garrison soldiers. Even a few Beysibs who had not gone back to bed lent their hands.

"Otherwise," she said to Walegrin, "all this will have been for nothing."

She left him then, and Leyn, who still had the key, let her out through the Gate of the Gods. When no one could see her, the tears at last spilled down her cheeks, and hating the tears, she began to run. She didn't know the streets she took, nor did she know the time that passed before her grief and anger subsided. She wound up on the wharf again where she had been the night before, sitting, dangling her feet over the deep water as Sabellia began her journey through the sky.

She could still feel Zip's eyes upon her back, watching her as he had last evening.

She shuddered and hugged herself and wished for Reyk to keep her company. But the falcon was in his cage, and she was alone.

Alone.

As alone as Tempus Thales?

Haught opened the sealed window ever so carefully, in this nightbound room of shrouded furniture, the hulking, concealed chairs and table like so many pale ghosts reverted only then to furniture, pretending in the shadows. He made no sound. He made no trial of the wards which sealed the place, nor even of the vented shutters which closed the outside. But a wind breached those barriers effortlessly. The first breath of outside that had come into the mansion in... very long, stirred the draperies and the sheets and brought a sultry warmth to the dank, sealed staleness in which he had lived.

That wind stirred the few grains of dust that were about. (It was an astonishingly clean house, for one sealed so long, from which servants had long since fled.) It swept down the halls and into another room, and touched at the face of a man who slept... likewise very long. In that darkness, in that silence in which the mere arrival of a breeze was remarkable, that cold and handsome face lost its corpselike rigor; the nostrils widened. The eyes opened, long lashed, mere slits. The chest heaved with a wider breath.

But Haught knew none of these things. He was drawn. He felt the exercise of magics like a tremor in the foundations, a quivering in his bones. He felt the power coming from that ruin across the street, where most of an entire block of Sanctuary's finest houses had mingled all in one charcoaled wreckage of tumbled brick and stone and timbers; and he felt it rush elsewhere, tantalizing and horrific and soul-threatening. He bent down to peer through the vents of that window, careful to shroud himself, which was his chiefest Talent, to go invisible to mages and other Talents. To that, his magic had descended. He spied on the working of magic that he could not presently command. He longed after power and he longed after his freedom, neither one of which he dared try to take.

He saw the coming together of his enemies out there in the dark, saw looks directed toward the house, and felt the straining of spells which the witch Ischade had woven about his prison. He shivered, as he stood there and inhaled that wind redolent of old burning and present sorceries and exorcisms, of revenge; he suddenly knew this house the target of all these preparations, and he felt an overwhelming terror: and trembled with his hatred. He felt the power build, and the wards flare with a moment's dissolution-

And he was paralyzed, frozen with doubt of himself, even while that dreadful force came all about the house and burst the wards in a great flare of light.

He screamed.

Elsewhere the sleeper started upright, and convulsed, and smoked from head to foot, which smoke streamed in a flash toward the hall, and the chimney, and aloft, in a moment that all living flesh in the house was battered with light and sound and pain.

The sleeper fell back again, slack-limbed; Haught collapsed by the window in the front room, and by the time he was conscious enough to lift himself on his arms and assess the damage, all the air seemed still and numb, his hearing blasted by a sound which never might have been sound at all.

He gathered himself up and clung to the sill, and lifted himself further, trembling. He stood there in that condition till it was all quiet again, stood there till the shadowed figures went their way from the ruin across the street, and he dared finally move the window and shut it again.

A hand descended on his shoulder and he whirled and let out a scream that made it very fortunate that the party across the street had dispersed.

The calm, handsome face that stared so closely into his- smiled. It was not the smile of the man who had owned the body. It was not that of the witch who lived there now. Nothing sane was at home within that shell. Haught was a mage, still. Against another threat he might fling out some power, even with the crippling of magic throughout the town; he was still formidable.

But what slept behind those eyes, what wandered there sometimes sane and sometimes not, and sometimes one mind and sometimes another... was death. It had reasons, if it remembered them, to take a slow revenge; and to hurl magic against the wards (he felt them restored) which held that soul in-

Haught prayed to his distant gods and cringed against the shutters, made an unwanted rattle and flinched again. Ischade had been there. Ischade had been near enough long enough that perhaps this thing that looked like Tasfalen would pick that up; and remember its intentions again in some rage to blast wards and souls at once.

But the revenant merely lifted a hand and touched his face, lover's gesture. "Dust," it said, which was its only word; daily Haught swept up the dust which infiltrated the house, and sifted it for the dust of magics which might linger in it, the remnant of the Globe of Power; with that dust he made a potion, and dutifully he infused it into this creature, stealing only a little for himself. He was faithful in this. He feared not to be. He feared a great deal in these long months, did Haught, once and for a few not-forgotten moments, the master mage of Sanctuary; he suspected consequences which paralyzed him in doubt. Because he had choices he dared none of them: his fear went that deep. It was his particular hell. "It's all right," he said now. "Go back to bed. Go to sleep." As if he spoke to some child.

"Pretty," it said. But it was not a child's voice, or a child's touch. It had found a new word. He shuddered and sought a way quietly to leave, to slip aside till it should sleep again. It had him trapped. "Pretty." The voice was clear, as if some deeper timbre had been there and now was lost. As if part of the madness had dispersed. But not all.

He dared do nothing at all. Not to scream and not to run and not to do anything which might make it recall who it was. He could read minds, and he kept himself from this one with every barrier he could hold. What happened behind those eyes he did not want to know.

"Here," he said, and tried to draw the arm down and lead it back to bed and rest. But it had as well be stone; and all hell was in that low and vocally masculine laugh.