The Dead of Winter- - Thieves World 07 (21 page)

"then, in time, I'll take care of you myself." Molin drew himself proudly erect. "Don't threaten me, Niece. The gods have made you powerful, but you forget I know your secrets. I know how you can die!" Chenaya grabbed Molin by the front of his robe, ripped the hem of her own gown as she lifted and bent him backward over the balcony, twisted him so he could see the ground far below.

"You know how," she growled, "but not when. Would you drown me. Uncle, throw me in the river? You foolish old man! After I discovered what a snake you are the first thing I learned to do was swim. You have my secrets, but see what good they do you." She set him back on his feet, pleased by the fine, sudden sweat sheen on his brow.

Molin rubbed his back where the stone had bitten into it. "Damn you! Don't you ever get tired of games? Don't you weary of always winning?" Amazed, she threw back her head and laughed. "Uncle, you're such a delight! The joy isn't in the winning, but in seeing the effect of winning on the loser." She left him, then. Inside the hall, the noise of conversation had reached a new height. Shupansea had not returned, nor was Kadakithis anywhere in sight. Daphne moved through the crowd, smiling and tinkling with laughter with Dayrne as her escort. Lowan and Rosanda stood alone in a corner in private dialogue.

"Is it true you were undefeated in the Rankan Games?" Chenaya looked disdainfully at the little man who had dared to brush her elbow. He offered her a goblet of wine which she refused, and he repeated his question.

"Your name is Terryle, isn't it?" she asked innocently. "The tax collector?" His face lit up, and he made a slight bow. "My fame precedes me!" Chenaya wrinkled her nose and imitated his tone. "Is it true you're the most detested man in Sanctuary?" His brows shot up. She walked away before any more could come of the conversation. She saw the man Lastel coming her way. Strange, she thought. None of this is as I thought it would be. She'd won, but there was a bitter taste in her mouth. She recalled something she'd said to Daphne: Even winning can cost a dear price.

Without a word to anyone she mounted the steps, nodded goodnight to Lu-Broca and left the Palace. A few guests mingled in Vashanka's Square on the Palace grounds, but she avoided them. Just outside the Processional Gate four of her gladiators waited with her palanquin. Too late, she realized she'd left a fine cloak inside. No matter, she would send for it tomorrow. Right now, she wanted to get home, change into leathers and take a walk with Reyk. The falcon was the only company she wanted.

The palanquin began to move. Chenaya sighed, pulled the curtains closed and hugged herself against the cold.

C. J. Cherryh

I

It was an uncommon meeting of Stepsons, recent and previous. It took place one night at winter's edge, outside the weed-grown garden of a smallish house on the riverside, a house in which the outer dimensions and the inner ones did not well agree. Ischade was its owner. And this meeting was on a midnight when She was occupied with another visitor in the inside of this outwardly-small house . and a bay horse waited sleepily at the front.

"Stilcho," the Stepson-ghost whispered; and Stilcho, fugitive from his bed within the house (rejected lately, solitary within the witch's abode) stirred in his dejected posture and lifted his head from his cloaked arms and opened his eyes, only one of which existed.

Janni hovered by the back step, in one of his less palatable manifestations, adrip with gore, rib-bone showing through shreds of skin. Stilcho gathered himself to his feet, wrapped his cloak about him and put a little distance between them-he was no ghost, himself, but he was dead: so he understood ghosts all too well and knew an agitated one when he saw it, both in this world and the next.

"I want to talk with you," Janni said. "I've got to talk."

"Go away." Stilcho was acutely conscious of the living presence in the small house, of wards and watches that existed all about the yard. He spoke in his mind, because Janni was in his head as much as he was standing on the walk-and just as definitely as Janni was there in his mind, he was standing on that walk. Stilcho knew. He had raised this ghost. Revenge, Stilcho had whispered simply, and this ghost, wandering aimless on the far shores of nowhere among other lost souls, had turned and lifted its bloody face and licked its bloody lips. Revenge and Roxane. That had been enough to bring Janni back to the living. But there were penalties for revenants such as Janni. Memory was one. Attachments were another sort. Hell was not the other side alone. Such dead brought it with them and made it where they walked, even with the best intentions. And this one had been too long out of hell, ignoring orders, going where it pleased in the town.

The aspect grew worse. Blood dropped onto the steps. There was a reek in the air. It would not be denied, would not go away; and Stilcho walked away down the tangled path to the iron gate, where the brush and the trees and the earth itself gave way to dark air, to the black river that gnawed and muttered at the shore on which the house sat. He looked back, never having hoped the ghost would retreat. "For godssakes, man-"

"He's in trouble," Janni said. "My partner's in trouble, dammit-"

'Not your partner. No longer your partner. You're dead, have you got it yet?" Stilcho blinked and ran a hand through his hair, grimaced as the ghost achieved his worst aspect. Stilcho had a real body, however scarred and maimed; and Janni had none; or had whatever his mood of the moment gave him, which was the way with ghosts of Janni's sort. "If She finds you off patrol again-"

"She'll do what? Kill me? Look, friend-"

'Not your friend. There're new ghosts in hell. You know them. You know who made them-"

"It was overdue." Janni's face acquired eyes, glaring through a red film in the moonlight. "Long overdue, that housecleaning. What were they to you? Half Rankene, nothings-They had their chance."

Stilcho turned and glared, his back to the river. "My dead-you sanctimonious prig. My dead-" Stepsons murdered by Stepsons, his barracksmates slaughtered, and several-score bewildered, betrayed ghosts were clamoring tonight at the gates of Hell. It was Ischade's doing, and Straton's; but Stilcho did not carry that complaint where it was due. "No wonder you don't want to go back down there-Is that it, Janni-butcher? Partner to butchers? Hell got too large a welcoming-committee waiting for you?" Janni reached for him in anger and Stilcho retreated against the low gate. It gave backward unexpectedly, above the abyss, and Stilcho's heart jumped. He feared wards broken. He feared the steep slope that the path took along the riverside, and remembered that he could die of other things than Ischade's inattention. He stood in the gateway and held his ground with bluff. "Don't you lay a hand on me. Or I'll take you back where I got you. Now. And you'll find the witch-bitch Roxane was pleasant company. What's in hell is forever, Janni-ghost. And they'll love to have you with them, damned, like them. They'll wait at the gates for you. Real patient. Or shall I call their names? I know their names, Janni-prig. I don't think you ever bothered to learn them."

Janni stopped at least. Stood there on the path, silent, solid-and live looking, give or take the blood that smeared his face. Janni wanted badly to be back among the living, for reasons not all of which were savory. Love was one. And it was never a savory kind of love, the dead for the living. Janni had not learned that.

Stilcho had. In that improbably small house he knew himself supplanted by the living-perhaps fatally.

"You're Rankene," Janni said. "You somehow forget that, boy?"

"I don't forget a thing. Look at me and tell me what I can forget. Look what happened to us for your sake, while you were off a-heroing and left us this sinkhole. And you come home with thanks, do you? Straton slaughters my barracksmates for failing your precious purity and your Niko, that paragon of virtue, falls straight into bed with the Nisi witch-"

"Lie."

"The witch who killed you, man. Where's his virtue? Sent to hell with the likes of me and you? I don't bloody care!"

Ischade half-heard the whisperings of her ghosts outside the house, the true and the half-dead; and ignored them for the living inside-for the warm and living and far more attractive person of the third Stepson, whose name was Straton. He gazed at her, his head on her silken pillow, in her silk-strewn bed-chief interrogator, chief torturer, when the Stepsons had to apply that art-soldier by preference. He was a big man, a moodish man of wry humors and the most delicate skills with a body (one could guess where acquired), and he would survive this night too-she was determined he should, and she gazed back at him in the dim light of golden candles, in the eclectic clutter of her private alcove-strewn spiderlike with bright silks, with the spoils of other men, other victims of her peculiar curse.

"Why," he asked (Straton was always full of questions), "why can't you get rid of this-curse of yours?"

"Because-" She laid a cautioning finger on his chin, and planted a kiss after it, "because. If I told you that you'd not rest; you'd be a great fool all for my sake. And that would be the end of you."

"Ranke's ending. What have I got? Maybe I'd rather be a fool. Maybe I can't help but be one." A tiny frown-line knit his brow. He stared into her eyes. "How many men are this lucky this long?"

"None," she whispered, low as the rustle of wind in the brush, as the ghost voices outside. "None for long. So far. Hush. Would you love me if there were no danger? If I were safe you'd leave me. The same way you left Ranke. The same way you've stayed in Sanctuary. The same way you ride the streets on that great bay horse of yours that too many know-it's death you court, Strat. Indeed it is. I'm only a symptom."

"You mean to add me to your collection, dammit; like Stilcho, like Janni-"

"I mean to keep you alive, dammit, for my reasons." The dammit was mockery. Her curses were real, and deadly. She touched his temple, where a small scar was, where the hair was growing thin. "You're no boy, no fool, I won't have you become one at this stage of your life. Listen to me and I'll tell you things-" Stilcho shivered there in the dark against the gate, his back to the river-he still could shiver, though his flesh was less warm than formerly. And having been rash with Janni he passed further bounds of good sense. He stared at the ghost and saw that Janni was not his usual furious self. There was something diminished about the ghost. And desperate. As if his arguments had told. "So you want my help," he said to Janni, "to get Niko back. You and he can go to hell together for what I care. Ask Her, why don't you?"

"I'm asking you." The ghost wavered and resumed solid shape. "You were one of the best of the ones we recruited. You were one-who'd have been one of us, after. After the war. Where were those precious lads when you wanted help out on that bridge, in that sty Downwind while the Ilsigi took you apart? Who helped you? The Ilsigi-loving dogs Strat cleaned out? You're Rankan."

"Half. Half, you bloody prig, and not good enough for you till you were short of help. No, there's a damn lot I don't forget. You left us as bloody meat-Ran out on us, left us to hold this hell-hole, dammit, you knew the Nisi would hit at your underbelly, come in here where Ranke's hold's weakest. Not with swords, no; with witchery and money, the sort of thing the Nisibisi are long on and this gods-forsaken pit of a town is apt for-"

"And corruption inside, inside the corps. Dammit, how quick did you forget? You love the Wrigglie bastards that did that to you? You defend your Wrigglie-loving barracksmates? Stilcho," Janni's face wavered in and out of solidity. "Stilcho your barracksmates damn well left you on that bridge. They left you to die slow.

/ know about dying slow, Stilcho; believe me that I know. And you're right about the Nisibisi outflanking us-everlasting right. But what else could we do? Lose it up north? The Band did what they could. Men coming back from that-maybe maybe they had to save what of their honor they could here in Sanctuary. And you know what your barracks-mates were into, you know what the Band found when they walked in-It was only the dregs survived. Some on the take from the Wrigglies; some, dammit, from the Nisibisi themselves; the rest who dodged every duty they could-you know 'em, doing their patrols in the wineshops and the whorehouses while you stood out on that bridge while the damn rabble cut you to-"

"Let it go," Stilcho hissed; and in the little house beyond Janni's insubstantial body-gods, the lights dimmed, Stilcho imagined the harsh breathing, bodies twined, knew another of them was in the toils and irretrievable; and was in a hell of jealousy. "We left all of that. You've left it further than I have. You ought to learn that-"

"-it's in my interest," Ischade whispered against Straton's ear. "Whatever else you trust in this world, believe in self-interest; and my self-interest is this city; and against my self-interest is Roxane of Nisibis. Hostilities were her choice-far from mine. I never like noise. I never like attention-"

"Don't you."

She laughed without mirth, ignored his moving hands, took his face between hers and stared until his eyes grew quiet and deep and hazy. "Listen to me, Strat."

"Spells, you damned witch."

"Not while you can still curse me. I'm telling you a truth."

"Half our nights are dreams." He blinked, shook his head, blinked again.

"Dammit-"

"There's no street in Sanctuary I don't walk, there's no door and no gate I can't pass, no secret I can't hear. I gather things. I bundle them together and put them in your hands. I have no luck of my own. I give it away. I've left nobleborn dead in the gutter-oh, yes, and gathered up a slave and made him a lord-" She bent and kissed, lightly, gently, teased the thinning hair at his temple. "You feel a rumbling of change in the world and you rush to court your death. But change isn't death. Change is chance. In chance a man can rise as well as fall. Name me your enemies. Name me your dreams, Straton-Stepson, and I'll show you the way to them."