Robert Asprin - Blood Ties

He stood there in the midst of her scattered silks, the littered carpet and scarf-strewn chairs. And she shut the door at his back, never stirring from where she sat. He stared at her, and a little spark of reckoning flickered in his eyes. Or it was the disturbance of the candles that sent shadows racing? "I did think your hospitality was better than this."

The fire was there, inside her, it always was; and it stirred and grew in that way that, last night, should have sent her on the hunt. "I waited for you," she said. "I'm quite at my worst."

"No damned tricks."

"Is this how you pay your debts? I can wait, you know. So can you, or you'd be prey to your enemies. And you've so much vanity." She gestured at the wine on the tables. "So have I. Will you? Or shall we both be animals?"

He might have attempted rape, and then murder; she felt the tilt in that direction. And she felt him pull the other way. Surprisingly he smiled.

And came and sat down across from her, and drank her wine, in slow silence there at the empty hearth. "We'll be pulling out," he told her in the course of that drinking, amid other small talk. "We'll leave the town to-local forces. I'll be taking all of mine with me."

That was challenge. Strat, he meant. She stared at him from under her brows and let her mouth tighten ever so slightly at the corners. Her hand came to rest by the base of the wineglass. His covered it, and it was like the touch of fire. He sat there, his fingers moving ever so delicately, and let the fire grow-Wait, then. Enjoy the waiting. Till it was hard to breathe evenly, and the room blurred in the dilation of her eyes.

"We can wait all night," he said, while her pulse hammered at her temples and the room seemed to have too little air. She smiled at him, a slow baring of teeth.

"On the other hand," she said, and let her leg brush his beneath the table, "we could regret it in the morning."

He got up and drew her up against him. There was no time for undressing, no thinking of anything more, but a tending toward the couch close at hand, a hasty and rough passage of feverish hands. He did not so much as shed the mail shirt; it resisted her fingers and she clenched her hands into his outer clothing. "Careful," she said, "slow, go slowly-" when he thrust himself at her. Warning him, with the last of her sanity.

The room went white, and blue and green, and thunder cracked, spinning her through the dark, through warm summer air, through-

-nowhere, till she came to herself again, lying dazed under a starry sky, with the ramshackle maze of Sanctuary buildings leaning above her. She felt nothing for a while, nothing at all, and shut her eyes and blinked at the stars again, her fingers exploring what should have been silk, but was instead dusty cobblestone. The back of her head hurt where she had fallen. She felt bruised along her whole back, and where he had touched her she felt a burning like acid.

He never lost consciousness. For a moment he was clearly elsewhere, then lying stunned on pavement with a curbside against his ribs. He had hit hard, and he ached; and he likewise burned, not least with the slow realization that he was not in the riverside house, that he was lying in a midnight street somewhere in the uptown, and that he hurt like very hell.

He did not curse. He had learned a bloody-minded patience with the doings of gods and wizards. He only thought of killing, her, anything within reach, and most immediately any fool who found amusement in his plight.

When he had picked himself up off his face and gained his balance again there was no question which direction he was going.

It was a long tangle of streets, a long, limping course home, in which she had abundant time to gather the fragments of her composure. Her head ached. Her spine felt quite disarranged. And for the most urgent discomfort there was no relief until she rounded a comer and came face to face with one of Sanctuary's unwashed and ill-mannered.

The knife-wielding ruffian gave her no choice and that contented her no end. She left him in the alley where he had accosted her, likely to be taken for some poor sod dead of an overdose of one of Sanctuary's manifold vices. His eyes had that kind of vacancy. In a little while he would simply stop living, as the chance within his body multiplied by increments and everything went irredeemably wrong. The poor and the streetfolk died most easily: their health was generally bad to begin with, and his was decidedly worse even before she left him lying there quite forgetful that he had been with any woman.

She was, therefore, in a more reasoning frame of mind when she arrived on the street by the bridge, and walked up the road which most ignored, to her hedge and her fence on this back street of Sanctuary. But she was not the first one.

Tempus was already there, walking sword in hand about the perimeter, up along the fence; and he stopped in his tracks when she came from beyond the trees, into the feeble glow of the stars overhead and the light from between her shutters. There was rage in every line of him. But she kept walking, limping somewhat, until they were face to face. He looked her up and down. The sword inclined its point to the ground, slowly, and hung in his fist.

"Where were you?" he asked. "And where in hell is my horse?"

"Horse?"

"My horse!" He pointed with the sword to the front of the fence and the hedge, as if it were perfectly evident. In fact there was no horse in sight and he had ridden in; she had heard him. She gathered her forces and limped on to the front of the en-hedged fence, where the ground, still soft from the rain, was churned and trampled by large hooves.

And where one of her rosebushes was trampled to splinters.

She stood there staring at the ruin, and the light inside her shuttered house flickered brighter, glowed with a white incandescence. It died slowly as she turned. "A girl," she said. "A girl is the thief. At my house. From my guest."

"This wasn't your doing."

His voice was calmer, restrained.

"No," she said in soft and measured tones, "I do assure you." And drew herself up to all her height when he reached for her. "I've had quite enough, thank you."

"It threw you too."

"To the far side of the mage quarter." She drew in a hissing breath through wide nostrils. It smelled of horse and mud, trampled roses, and bitch. And there was wrath and chagrin both in this huge man, wrath that began to assume a certain embarrassed self-consciousness. "Our curses are not compatible, it seems. Storm and fire. And we were so well begun."

He said nothing. His breathing was rapid. He walked past her to the trampled ground and gave a whistle, piercingly shrill.

She caught it up for him, reached inside and flung it to the winds, so that he winced and faced her in startlement.

"If that will bring him," she said, "that will carry to him."

"That will bring him," Tempus said, "if he's alive."

"A young woman took him. Her smell is everywhere. And krrf. Don't you smell it?"

He drew in a larger breath. "Young woman."

"Not one I know. But I will. My roses come very dear."

"A bloody young bitch." It sounded particular and specific, his eyes narrowing in some precise identification.

"In frequent heat. Yes."

"Chenaya."

"Chenaya." She repeated the name and stored it away carefully. She waved the gate open. "A drink, Tempus Thales?"

He slid the sword into its sheath and walked with her, a light touch beneath her arm, steadying her as she walked up the steps, and wished the door open, a blaze of light into the dark thicket of the yard.

"Sit down," he said when they were inside; his voice was a marvel of self restrained gentleness; he poured wine for her, and then for himself. Then: "I owe you an apology," he said, as if the words were individually expensive. Then further: "There's mud in your hair."