Robert Asprin - Aftermath

Not that Crit cared about the town per se. No, he didn't. But he cared about his reputation, about not failing, about always doing what he was charged to do.

Even though for the first time in his life he'd truly argued, threatened to quit, to mutiny, to bolt, when Tempus had charged him with imposing order where order had never been, Critias couldn't turn away from a job unfinished. No matter what it cost.

In short order it had cost him his only friends here: Straton, his right- side partner and Sacred Band brother; Kama, the Riddler's daughter, abandoned in Sanctuary along with those others who had most dis- pleased her father; Marc, the weaponsmith who'd been his liaison with townies such as Zip; and Zip himself, the PFLS leader and third-shift commander, who now looked on Crit as the enemy because Crit was at the top of Sanctuary's reporting chain.

Where he'd never craved to be, and where Strat had struggled so hard to land.

Shaking his head, Crit started as moisture that had condensed on his unkempt hair spattered his brow and cheeks. In nondescript dockside garb, he was waiting for a contact. Doing what he knew how to do because Crit was a shadow mover, not an empire shaker. Tempus had left him with a shattered infrastructure he needed to fuse, somehow, into a working whole. Or lose. Fail. Crit knew how to do everything required of a soldier but that-he didn't know how to fail. He'd never learned. Was constitutionally incapable of learning, Strat used to say.

I Crit missed Strat like food and water. He missed Kama less, but still loved her. And still hated the gutterslime she'd taken up with: Molin Torchholder, the politicized priest of a pantheon unnatural to this Ilsig soil.

All the Rankan conquerors of this Ilsigi town of Sanctuary, and the Beysib invaders who had come after and made an uneasy alliance by marriage with the Rankan governor, Prince Kadakithis, mistook the townspeople here for the sort that were governable. And now Crit was responsible to see that at least the appearance of governance was instilled and maintained here, where the balance between gods and magic had suddenly crumbled and all that was left to do was rule Sanctuary by force of arms.

As commander-in-chief of the policing forces, he was responsible to the prince/governor Kadakithis, who was answerable to Theron and might lose more than his palace if the emperor's demands weren't met; responsible to Kadakithis's Beysib consort, Shupansea, who wasn't even human, but some sort of fish-woman from across a forbidden sea; respon- sible to Kama because she was the Riddler's daughter and, by all the gods that loved the armies, Crit's woman more than Molin's.

Kama had conceived a child with Crit and they'd lost it on a battle- field. Since then, she'd found whatever man she could to sleep with who'd be most hurtful to Crit when he found out. Which he always did, because she was her father's daughter and thought that women's ways were for lesser creatures, the way her father thought that men's limits applied only to his enemies.

Crit wanted more than anything to find Strat and simply leave, go up to Ranke and plead his case to Theron, get a new commission from the emperor. He was wasted here. Only Tempus knew what he'd done to deserve it.

But here he was, with the rest of the unloved, unvalued, and unwanted -with Strat; with Kama; with Randal, a warrior-mage who was the lesser half of a broken Sacred Band pair; with Gayle, the only 3rd Com- mando Tempus had told to tarry.

And with those they'd hoped to leave behind: Ischade, the vampire; Janni the Stepson's half-reconstituted ghost; Snapper Jo, the fiend who had tended bar at the Vulgar Unicorn; and, uptown somewhere among the hellish ruins of last winter's incomprehensible war of magic, whatever was left of Haught, the Nisibisi mageling, and of Roxane, the Nisibisi witch.

Strat had said-the only thing he had said about the matter-that Tempus had flat run out of nerve, turned tail and fled, leaving Crit hold- ing the bag. The very bag that Strat wanted so badly in his grip, Crit had thought but hadn't said.

Waiting alone, with no backup (because with Strat gone to Ischade there wasn't a single man he'd trust at his back), down on the slippery dockside hoping his contact would show soon, Crit had had too much time to brood.

He knew it; he knew himself. For the kind of subterranean work he was trained to do, self-knowledge was a prerequisite. If it weren't, his distress over Strat and the horrid triangle of the two of them and the vampire might well have killed him before this. Might kill him yet, if he became too distracted by it.

He had a job to do. Lots of jobs. He'd made sure of that. He couldn't afford too much time for reflection. This task before him wasn't going to be simple, but he needed to occupy his mind with something besides the conundrum of his partner. Tonight, it was finding and restoring Tasfalen, whose entire noble family was missing and had been missing far too long. Torchholder wanted the popinjay found. Or wanted Crit killed in the finding, so that there'd be no rival of consequence for Kama's affections by the time Molin did whatever he was planning about his current wife.

Crit wasn't mistaking Molin Torchholder: in the priest's mind, this was a suicide mission he'd forced on Crit, knowing Crit wouldn't dele- gate this sort of task to what men he had available. Zip's half-tame militia wasn't good for much but swaggering and street fights on their night shift; Walegrin's barracks of day-soldiers soldiered well enough, but knew nothing of covert means; and Crit wouldn't ask at the Mageguild-even with the Stepsons' mage, Randal, there, the price of magical aid in Sanc- tuary was always too high.

So that left only Jubal's thugs, one of whom Crit awaited. Jubal's faceless horde of enforcers would spit out one with a face tonight, and that one would lead Crit to Tasfalen.

Once Crit had verified the continued existence of the noble (or lack of ft-a corpse would do), he could get Torchholder off his back. And see Kama. For Crit was about ready to force an end to that particular prob- lem: either bring Kama back with him from the palace, to take up her rightful place in what was left of the Stepsons' barracks, or use her affair with Molin to blackmail the priest.

He wasn't sure which he liked better, but he liked both alternatives dough to bare his teeth in a humorless smile as he waited.

And waited. And waited. He stood. He sat. He paced. He leaned. He heard his horse nickering, then pawing the cobbles. He checked its tack, Stroked its nose. Strat's bay horse would have evoked the nicker he'd heard, but Crit didn't see the bay horse anywhere.

Just as well; the bay made him nervous. Made everybody nervous who didn't like reincarnated horses with spots on their withers through which a man could glimpse hell itself if the light was right.

Because of the nicker, Crit realized he didn't want to see Strat right now. Not until he'd solved the problem of Kama and Torchholder. Not now, when the gray sky and the gray buildings and the gray dockside melded with the gray horse Tempus had left him, to take the sting out of deserting him.

The gray was a prize, one of the best from the Stepsons' stock farm up at Wizardwall. Worth more than a block of the Maze, contents included. Worth more than the whole town, to some men's way of thinking.

But Crit would have given it to Strat gladly if Strat would only re- nounce the ghost-horse and the vampire woman who'd conjured it for him . - .

"Psst," said a voice from behind him and Crit refused to flinch, or jump, or betray the heart-stopping urgency within him that counseled a dive for cover, a drawn sword.

He turned slowly and said, "You're late, hawkmask."

"We aren't hawkmasks any longer," said an oddly accented voice from under a shadowing hooded cloak. "And I never was. We're just free- lancing, we are. Just workin' for pay. You like meres, bein' you was one." A languorous, professional lilt in a northern-accented voice that never- theless had a deadly, nervous edge to it.