Robert Asprin - Blood Ties

She gave out a breath of a laugh, and breathed larger and wider and found herself awake. It was not a pleasant laugh, as the look on Tempus's face was not a pleasant one. "There's mud on your chin," she said, and he wiped at it, with a hand likewise smudged. They both stank of the streets. He grinned suddenly, wolflike. "I'd say," Ischade said, "we were fortunate."

He drank off his glass. She poured another round.

"Do you get drunk?" he asked, directly.

"Not readily. Do you?"

"No," he said. There was a difference in his tone. It was not arrogance. Or pride. He looked her straight in the eyes and it was clear that tonight, this moment, it was not a man-woman piece of business. It was similar perspective. It was a rare moment, she sensed, that a man got this close to Tempus Thales. And a woman-perhaps it was the first time.

She recalled him in the alley, on the horse, that something-to-prove manner of his.

But defeated, robbed and offended, he was being astonishingly sensible. He was going far to excess in it, and again she felt that precarious balance, polar opposite to the direction black rage insisted he go. He smiled at her and drank her wine, issues all forever unresolved.

One expected a man of vast lifespan to be complex. Or mad, at least to the limited perspective of those who lacked perspective. It was vitality of all sorts which was his curse, healing, sex, immortality.

Annihilation was hers. And the apposition of their curses was impossible.

She laughed, and leaned her elbow on the table and wiped her mouth with the back of a soiled hand.

"What amuses you?" There, the suspicion was quite ready.

"Little. Little. Your horse and my roses. Us." As distant hooves echoed in the streets, within her awareness. "Shall we dice for the bitch?"

He had heard the horse coming. He recovered himself, as she had guessed, became the stranger again, and headed for her door.

Well enough.

She came out a moment or two later, when the horse had come thundering up, and brought a cloak which had lain underfoot for months. It was velvet, soiled, and a horse which had run the width of Sanctuary was bound to be sweated. "Here," she said, joining him at the open gate. "For the horse." Which was rolling its eyes and lolling its tongue and reeking of krrf as he worked at the cinch. Tempus snatched the skewed saddle off, jerked the cloak from her hands, and used it on the Tros.

"Damn," Tempus said over and over.

"Let me." She moved in despite the hazard from both, put out a calm hand, and touched the Tros's bowed forehead; it was a little exertion. Her head throbbed and it cost her more than she had thought. But the horse steadied, and his breathing grew more regular. "There."

Tempus wiped and rubbed, walked the horse in a little circle on the level ground. And never said a word.

"He's all right," she said. He knew her magics, that they could heal-others with some skill; her own hurts with less effectiveness. He had seen her work before.

He looked her way. She demanded no gratitude, nor expected any. There was a sour taste in her mouth for this abuse of an animal. Their personal discomfiture she could find irony in. Not this.

She stood with her arms folded and her cloak about her while Tempus carefully, without a word, threw the sweated blanket and the saddle on. The Tros ducked its head and scratched its cheek on its foreleg, as if abashed.

He finished the cinch and gathered up the reins, looked once her direction, and then swung up.

And rode off without a word.

She heaved a sigh, the cloak wrapped about her despite the steamy warmth of the night. Hoofbeats diminished on the cobbles.

The wide focus had disappeared, along with the ennui. Dawn was lightening the east. She walked back along the path and closed the gate behind her, opened the door, arms folded and head bowed.

Her perspective had vanished, together with the ennui, from the time that they had met in the alley. And since that encounter in the ruin, something had nagged at her which said danger, which had nothing to do with human spite. It did have something to do with what they had carried out uptown, some misfortune which encompassed her and perhaps Tempus.

Since the Nisi Globes of Power had dispersed their influence over the town, surprising things happened. Mages missed, sometimes: far more of chance governed magics than before, and common folk had more of luck in their lives than they were wont, amazing in Sanctuary; but dismaying for the town, mages who worked the greater magics found their powers curtailed, and sometimes found the results askew.

Therefore she abstained from the greater workings, until she let herself be talked into an exorcism, principally by the Hazard Randal, whose professional and personal honesty she counted impeccable-rarest of qualities, a magician of few self-interests.

Now she simply had that persistent feeling of unease, exacerbated, perhaps, by the experience of being hurled from one side of Sanctuary to the other, by the bruises and the throbbing in his skull. Fool! to have tried such a thing, such a damned, blind trial of a curse that had been, for a while and in the height of Sanctuary's power, manageable.

The headache was just payment. It could have been much worse.

It would have been worse, for instance, had she kept Stra-ton, had this blindness and execrably bad judgment brought him back to her bed, opened that old wound.

And morning seen him dead as that drunken fool in a Sanctuary alley, who was by now neither drunken nor any longer a fool, nor able to see the dawn in front of his eyes.

"We can't both leave," Stilcho concluded. Sleep eluded them both. They were hoarse and blear-eyed and exhausted, sitting opposite each other at the rickety little table. "I can't leave you here alone with that thing."

"I found it, dammit." Moria wiped back a stringing lock and brought the hand hard onto the table. "Don't treat me like a damn fool, Stilcho, don't tell me how to manage! I carried it clean across town! We melt it-"

"What with, for godssakes? On the damned little firepot we cook on? We just get a damned hot lump of-"

"Hssssst!" Her hand came up out-turned toward his mouth, her face twisted in fury. "These walls! These walls, dammit, how many times do I have to tell you keep your voice down! I'll steal us the stuff, how do you think we come by anything lately, except / steal it, and you live on it! Don't you tell me what to do! I've had it all my life, and I'm not taking it, I'm not taking any of it, not from you and not from anybody!"

"Don't be a damned fool! You go flashing gold bits around this town you'll get your throat cut, this isn't silver, dammit, listen. Listen! You-" Of a sudden, even in the gray morning light filtering through the window, the vision of the lost eye shifted in, stronger than the living one. He stopped, his heart laboring in terror.

"Stilcho?" Moria's voice was higher, frightened. "Stilcho?"

"Something's wrong," he said. In that inner eye, soiled, filmy shapes went streaming like smoke through the gates, the gates-the fires, the lost reaches.... "A lot of people just died." He swallowed hard, tried to calm his shaking, tried to get back the sight of Moria across the table, and not that black vision where Something waited, where by the riverside-in the woods-

"Stilcho!" Her nails bit into his hand. He blinked and tried again to focus, succeeded finally in seeing her, beyond a veil like black gauze.

"Help me. M-moria-"

She rose and her chair overset, crashing down so violently she came and grabbed him and held on to him with all her might. "Don't, don't, don't, dammit, don't, come back-"

"I don't want to go down there, I don't want to die again -oh gods, Moria!" His teeth would not stop chattering. He could shut his living eye. He had no such power over the dead one. "It's in hell, Moria, a piece of me is in hell and I can't blink, I can't shut it, I can't get rid of it-"