Robert Asprin - Blood Ties

The room was paneled in cedar, and behind gauze curtains the windows were screened by marble filigree. What part of it was not taken up by the bed was covered by thick carpet and silken cushions, and there was a rosewood table with a flagon and two goblets of gold. But of course the bed was the point of it all, and Lalo was already waiting beside it, carrying off with more presence than she would have believed possible, a long caftan of jade green brocaded in gold.

He seemed to be memorizing the pattern of the carpet. Gilla thought. If he laughs at me I will murder him!

And then he lifted his head, and in his worn face, his eyes were glowing as they had when he looked on her in the Other-world. Behind her, Gilla could hear the rustle of silk and a giggle cut short as the slave girls backed out of the room. The door clicked shut.

"Health to you, my lord and husband." Gilla's voice shook only a little as she said the words.

Lalo licked dry lips, then stepped carefully to the table and poured wine. He offered her one of the goblets. "Health to you," he said, lifting the other, "my wife and my queen."

The goblets rang as they touched. Gilla felt the sweet fire of the wine burning down her throat to her belly, and another kind of fire kindling in her flesh as she met his eyes.

"Health to all the land," she whispered, "and the healing fire of love...."

Torches painted the rubble of Dyareela's temple with their lurid glare, dyeing with an even deeper crimson the blood-splattered robes of the priests and the severed head of the sacrifice. The sweet stink of blood hung heavy in the air, and the line of soldiers watched with wary eyes the chanting, murmuring masses of humanity who had crowded into the ruins to see it. The priests were praying now, straining grotesquely toward a darkness of cloud or smoke that blotted out the stars.

"Whatever they're expecting, they'd better get on with it," said a man of the Third Commando. "That kind of babbling won't hold this lot long. They've seen blood, and they'll want more of it soon!"

The man on his right nodded. "Stupid of Kittycat to allow it-anyone could see what would hap-" His words faded to a mumble as Sync's stony eye passed along the line, but his companion heard him add, with a faith that in the circumstances was touching, "This wouldn't of happened if Tempus was here."

"Dyareela, Dyareela, hear, oh, hear!" chanted the crowd. Hear, hear, or maybe it was fear, fear, echoed from shattered pillars and walls. "Have mercy-" came the drawn out cry. A shiver of eagerness ran through the crowd and the soldiers stiffened, knowing what was coming now.

Torches flickered wildly in a great gust of wind, a damp wind that came from the sea. The wind gusted again, and the scene grew perceptibly less lurid as several of the torches were blown out. A priest grabbed helplessly as his headdress went sailing away, and the crowd was abruptly distracted from its bloodlust by the struggle for gold thread and jewels. Then somewhere out to sea, thunder rumbled, and the remaining torches were doused by the first splatterings of rain.

Rain hissed in the embers of burned buildings and rinsed the ashes from the roofs of those houses which had survived. It scoured the streets and ran clear in the gutters, filled the sewers and flushed their festering contents down the river out to sea. It washed the reek of blood from the air, and left behind it the clean scent of rain. Men who moments before had growled like beasts stood with faces upturned to the suddenly beneficent heavens, and found the water that ran down their faces mingled inexplicably with tears.

Grumbling, the priests scrambled to get their finery under cover, while the crowd dispersed like drops from a fountain, and presently the bemused soldiery were allowed to break ranks and seek the shelter of their barracks at last.

All that night the clean rain pattered on the roofs of the town. Illyra opened her window to let the cool air in and, returning to Latilla, felt the moisture of sudden perspiration on the child's tight skin. Her own eyes blurring, she heaped blankets around her, then went fearfully to Lalo's worktable. The cards fluttered like live things in the damp wind. With beating heart, the S'danzo began to lay out the Pattern again.

In the morning, the sun rose on a town washed clean.

And there was a new bud on Gilla's peach tree.

Down on Wideway by the docks, where a warehouse destroyed by fire was being rebuilt by fish-eyed Beysibs to house a glass-making enterprise as alien as the fish-folk who funded it, a big man in tattered trail gear sat alone on a mud colored horse and watched the storm roll in from the sea.

Thunderstorms in Sanctuary during summer weren't uncommon. This one, loud as a wounded bear and dark as a witch's eye, cleared the dockside of folk as he watched from shadows thrown by two overhanging roofs: Thunderstorms, these days in a revolution-wracked thieves' world suddenly bereft of the magic that had driven it, meant that a new and feral god called Stormbringer was abroad.

The big man, on the horse whose muddy disguise did nothing to hide its extraordinary girth or the intelligence in its eyes, cared nothing for the god behind the storm-if indeed the chaotic principle named Stormbringer could rightfully be called one.

The man cared more than he wished to admit for that god's daughter-for Jihan, called Froth Daughter, primal expression of Stormbringer's lust for wind and wave, who was betrothed to Randal, the Tysian wizard, and trapped here until the marriage either was consummated or renounced. He'd cared enough to return to Sanctuary, though it was doomed by imperial decree and the folly of its own selfish inhabitants- doomed to eradication at New Year's, when the grace period the new Rankan Emperor, Theron, had given Prince/Governor Kadakithis would have elapsed without order being restored here.

Then the Emperor's troops would come in a multitude- "Even though it be a soldier for every tramp, an arrow for every rebel, a legion if necessary," in Theron's words-and the thieves' world would be a fools' paradise no longer.

Pacifying refractory towns was a passion of Theron's. Pacifying wizard-ridden Sanctuary might once have been an impossibility, but not now: The feuding witches and the greedy priests had, between them, managed to destroy both Nisibisi Globes of Power before spring had sprung, leaving Sanctuary's magical fabric rent and its wards weakened.

At long last. Sanctuary had become what Tempus's fighters of the Sacred Band had long called it: well and truly damned. That this damnation had come from the greedy power plays of its low-lifes, rather than from the pillar of fire which had sprung from an uptown house to affront the heavens, didn't surprise Tempus.

The fact that no one in town save the weakened wizards and a handful of impotent priests knew the truth of it-how Sanctuary had destroyed its own manna and been deserted by the more prudent of its pantheon of gods-did surprise even the unflappable Riddler who now headed his horse into the storm and northeast toward the Maze.

He felt no twinge of nostalgia for the old days, when he'd ridden these streets alone as a palace Hell-Hound in Kada-kithis's employ, testing the prince's mettle for the Rankan interests who eventually chose Theron in Kadakithis's stead. But he felt a spark of regret when he passed the docks from which Nikodemos, his favorite among the mercenary fighters who followed him, had departed seaward, bound for the Ban-daran Islands with two godchildren who might have been Sanctuary's only hope.

As Niko might have been the only hope of a man who'd taken the name Tempus when he realized that his curse caused time itself to pass him by. But hopes were for Sanctuarites, the children of the damned, the dark Ilsigi whom Rankan and Beysib oppressors alike called Wrigglies, and for women touched with Nisibisi wizard blood who sucked purer blood in Sanctuary's steamy summer nights-for anyone but him.