Robert Asprin - Aftermath

Crit squinted into the gloom but the only thing he saw better for his trouble was the rigging of a small fishing boat bobbing behind the stranger, much farther down the quayside than the cloaked man.

Was it a masking spell, or a trick of the light that veiled this face in gloom? The fellow was out of reach, but just barely. And familiar, but so was half of Sanctuary. Someone he'd rousted long ago, Crit's mind said, and started spinning through the years, seeking to match a face to the voice he recognized.

Crit asked, to hear the voice again, "What do you want, honest work? There isn't any, not here. Prefer my service to Jubal's? Is that what you're getting at?"

"Yours? You've got a service, now? That's how come the black man sent me to help you out?"

The hooded man's ^'s were sibilantly northern and the tension underly- ing his words was full of satisfaction.

Somebody they'd done something to once, for sure. Somebody the Sacred Band hadn't treated with softest gloves. Somebody who was en- joying this more than he ought, because he feared Crit and his kind more than he'd admit.

"Got a name, friend?" Crit said easily, shifting enough that he could slide his hand onto his belt and his fingers toward his knife's hilt without being either too obvious or too surreptitious. It wasn't a threat so much as a punctuation mark.

The contact saw, and tossed his head. "Vis. Ring a bell. Commander?"

Commander. Crit still couldn't get used to it, not in Sanctuary, not in this context, not with all its current connotations. Did Tempus still hold Crit's affair with Kama against him so venomously that he'd sentence him to years of hard labor here with violent death at the end of it?

For Crit remembered this "Vis" now, and what he recalled didn't put him at ease. Mradhon Vis, a northerner- Thief, malefactor, one-time part- ner-in-crime of the Nisibisi mageling, Haught. And gods knew of whom or what else. They'd beaten information out of Vis more than once, when the Stepsons were fighting the Nisibisi witch here. Strat, the Stepsons' chief interrogator, had. Crit had been in command of the intelligence unit then. They'd brought this fool up to the Shambles safe house, drawn the iron shutters, and taught him the sort of respect that turns to hatred if left untended.

There were dozens, perhaps scores, of Vises he and Strat had made in Sanctuary. If Crit lived long enough, one of them was going to try to kill him. Perhaps this one. Perhaps tonight.

"Vis," he repeated, his voice low. "Right, I remember. Well, let's go, Vis. Let's see what you've got."

"My pleasure. Commander," said the mercenary, and chuckled nas- tily. "If you'll follow me into those shadows there, the worst is yet to come."

"I'm telling you," whispered Kama intently to Straton over her beer, "Zip's moving the altar stones uptown to the Street of Temples-moving them and what they housed."

Finished, she sat back, eyeing the other patrons of the Vulgar Unicorn surreptitiously. No one had heard, she was certain. She'd been careful of her volume, as well as the drunken slur in her voice. No one human, that is. The fiend who was tending bar late tonight had great gray ears and eyes that looked every which way. His warty countenance was averted, but that meant nothing. In the bronze mirror behind the bar he could be watching them ...

"So what?" Strat growled, truculent, one arm absently rubbing his damaged shoulder. Perhaps once the best man with weapons among the Stepsons, Strat was doubly wounded now: Ischade either couldn't, or Wouldn't, heal his shoulder and there were no Stepsons here for him to be Mnong.

"So, we've got to stop it," she said. Her heart ached for Strat, and for them all, left here where nothing of consequence remained in the wake of er father's leave-taking. She and Strat had something in common now- amething more than Crit. They had to shore up the sagging bulwark of ommand because Tempus might be testing them. None of the others salized it, but Kama did. If her father rode into town of a morning, sady to welcome them back to the fold if only they'd put the town to ights, Kama didn't want to be found wanting.

But the big Stepson was too drunk, or too deeply hurt, to understand that she meant. "Stop it? Why? So Zip's found some sort of pet demon r minor deity-some Ilsig spirit to worship. What difference does it nake? The gods fare no better here than magic-or fighters."

Strat believed only in the magic of Ischade, Kama knew. He'd seen too nuch, too many dead reborn, too many undead abroad in the streets at light. Strat had seen his doom and embraced it: he was as much the 'ampire's creature as any of her slaves.

"C'mon, Straton," she insisted blearily, tugging on the Stepson's leeve. "Come with me. I'll show you."

"You and your lovers," Strat grumbled over the screech of his stool's egs on sawdusted board, "What the frog you wanna do about it if you ind him lickin' his demon's feet?"

"Ssh." Kama warned, and put her small hand to the flat of Strat's back, pushing him toward the door like a wife who'd made a nightly trip o the Unicorn to bring her drunken husband home to bed. Snapper Jo aluted her with his raffish inhuman grin, dipping his bristly chin in a ;esture of respect.

Great. Homage from a fiend, friends in high places, estranged from her real friends because of that: because of Molin, who had another wife, Crit ind Gayle and Randal avoided her like the plague. Only Straton, in limilar circumstances, of all the men she'd campaigned with in the Wiz- ird Wars, acknowledged her. And Zip ...

As Strat had jibed, Zip was another of her lovers. Men used their nuscle and their sex for intimidation, and no one thought ill of them for t. Kama was a different sort of operator, but used what she had to. Whatever worked to do the job. It stung her to the quick the way the men she'd fought beside treated her now, simply because she'd let the high priest wield his influence to help her. If her father had had a dozen lovers, or a hundred victims of his holy aping member, no Sanctuarite would have snickered or presumed to criticize. Maybe she should strip her next bed partner at knifepoint, prove herself her father's daughter to one and all. Maybe then Crit would stop looking past her when they met ...

Strat stumbled in the doorway, belched, and staggered down the stairs to the street. The bay horse whickered, its ears pricked. Kama shivered. The damned thing was dead as a doornail, just didn't know it. Strat didn't seem to know it either: he fumbled in his pouch, came up with a chunk of sugarbeet, and held it out on an open palm.

The ghost-horse's velvet lips delicately snatched the treat, and it snorted in pleasure.

Well, maybe not quite as dead as a doornail. But unnatural as hell. Unnatural as Sanctuary, a place Kama was determined to leave com- pletely out of the history she was writing of her father's exploits. Sanctu- ary deserved no chronicler, as it deserved nothing more than the oblitera- tion it was so obviously seeking.

The town had its own genius, Kama was sure, an Ilsig spirit that had finally had its fill of interlopers and was nudging the place itself toward oblivion's precipice. She wanted only to be quit of it before Sanctuary was razed to the ground by Rankans, gutted and left to rot by Beysibs, or torn stone from off of stone by internal strife.

A historian, Kama knew all the signs of a town dying. Sanctuary didn't lack a one: its gods were impotent; its magic had lost its power; its populace was polarized by generations of hatred; its children wanted only to destroy.

"What, Strat?" she said, startled by words undeciphered but still ring- ing in her ears. She looked up. The big Stepson was already mounted, reins in his right hand, his left arm carefully resting on one thigh.

"I said, finding Zip should be easy-it's his shift, the dead of night. You want him, let's go up to the command guardpost."