The Dead of Winter- - Thieves World 07 (26 page)

"Gone back to the witch, that's where." Zip dropped down on the wooden stairs of a building in the Maze, there on the street, and the beggar-looking woman who slouched in her rags nearby was listening, although she did not look at him. Zip was panting. He pulled out one of his knives and attacked the wood of the step between his legs. "He's one damn fool, you know that."

"Mind your mouth," Kama said. It was a slim woman and a lot of weaponry under all that cloak and cloth, and her face was smeared with dirt enough and her mouth crusted with her last meal, part of the disguise. She would even fool the nose. "You want to make yourself useful, get the hell to the Unicorn and pick up Windy. Tell him move and leave the rest to him."

"I'm not your damn errand-boy."

"Get!"

He got. Kama got up and waddled down the darkening street in her best old-woman way, toward another contact.

Moruth heard the dull flap of wings before the bird alit in the window of Mama Becho's. The beggar-king clenched his hands and listened, and when it appeared, a dark flutter outside the shutters, he resisted going to that window at the tavern's backside. But a hard, chisel beak tapped and scrabbled insistently. Wanting in.

He went and shoved the window open. The bird took off and lit again, glaring at him with shadowy eyes in the almost-night. It lifted then with a clap of wings and flapped away, mission accomplished.

Moruth had not the least desire in the world to go out tonight; he lived in constant terror, since the massacre over by Jubal's old estate, in the Stepson barracks. There were a lot of souls out on patrol in Sanctuary, round Shambles Cross. Old blind Mebbat said so; and Moruth, who had carried on warfare in the streets with Stepsons and hawkmasks, had no particular desire to meet what walked about on such nights.

But he went to the door and sent a messenger who sent others, and one ran up to a rooftop and waved a torch.

"Snakes," Ischade whispered, in bed with her lover. She kissed him gently and disengaged his fingers from her hair. "You ever put it together, Strat, that both Nisibis and the Beysib are fond of snakes?" He recalled a serpentine body rolling under his heel, a frantic moment the other side of Roxane's window.

"Coincidences," Ischade said. "That's possible of course. True coincidences are a rare thing, though. You know that. You don't believe in them any more than I do, being no fool at all."

Stilcho stopped, moving carefully now. Haught's hand sought his arm. "They're here," Haught said.

"They've been here for some time," Stilcho said of the shadows that shifted and twisted, blacker than other shadows. "We've crossed the line. You want to do the talking?"

"Don't try me. Don't try me, Stilcho."

"You think you're powerful enough to walk through the Shambles now and deal with all the ghosts at once. Do it, why don't you? Or why'd you bring me?" Haught's fingers bit painfully into his arm. "You talk to them, I say." No more remarks about his mother. Stilcho turned his head with deliberate slowness and looked at the gathering menace. No one alive was on the street but Haught. And himself. And many of these were Roxane's. Many were not-just lost souls left unattended and lately, in the lamentable condition of Sanctuary, without compulsion to go back to rest.

"I'm Stilcho," he said to them. And he took what he carried, a waterskin, and poured some of the contents on the road. But it was not water that pooled and glistened there. He stepped back. There was a dry rustling, a pushing and shoving, and something very like a living black blanket of many pieces settled above the glistening puddle on the cobbles. He backed away and spilled more.

"There'll be more," he said. "All you have to do is follow." Some ghosts turned away in horror. Most followed, a slow drifting. He dribbled more of the blood. He had not asked where it came from. These days it was easy come by.

For Ischade-more than most.

Strat struggled to open his eyes, and when he did there was a whisper in the air like bees in summer, there was a darkness above him like uncreation. "You suspect me," a voice said, like the bees, like the wind out of the dark, "of all manner of things. I told you: self-interest. Mine is this town. This town is where I hunt. This wicked, tangled town, this sink into which all wickedness pours-suits me as it is. I lend my strength to this side and to that. Right now I lend it to the Ilsigis. But you'll forget that by morning. You'll forget that and remember other things."

He got his eyes open again. It took all the strength he had. He saw her face in a way he had never seen it, looked her in the eyes and looked into hell, and wanted now to shut them, but he had lost that volition.

"I've told you what to do," she said. "Go. Leave, while you can. Get out of here!"

High on the hill a horn blew, brazen and pealing alarm. The alarm outside the Unicorn was more mundane and less elegant: a series of old pots battered with all the strength in a watcher's arm. Help, ha! Invasion, incursion, mayhem!

There was fire in Downwind. And uptown. In a dozen intersections barricades started going up, torches flared, horses' hooves clattered wildly through the night.

"Get 'em," Lysias the Black instructed his small band, and arrows rained down on one of Jubal's bands that planned to barricade the Blue line. "Rouse our wizard help up here, move it! That road stays open!"

From his vantage on a rooftop, bright fire sprang up on the hill. More horns and clatterings and brayings of alarms in the night. Militias hit the streets.

And a rider on a bay horse pelted down the riverside with reckless abandon right through the Blue, headed for Black lines and comrades. All hell was loose in the streets. Shutters broke (thieves in Sanctuary were no laggards, and had had their eyes set on this and that target from long before: when the riot broke, they smashed and grabbed and ran like all the devils and the Rankan pantheon was at their heels.)

Uptown, one of the horns braying and one of the alarms ringing was the mere barracks and the Guard; but Wale-grin, who had not been slow to pick up the rumors, already had his snipers posted, and the first surge of looters uptown met a flight of arrows and a series of professionally organized barricades. This was standard operation. It deterred the more dilatory of invaders. It did not deter all of them.

Down on riverside, Ischade sat wrapped only in her black robe, in the tumbled fiery silks of her bed, and grinned while her eyes rolled back in her head. Shadows poured down the riverside, shadows marched from the ravaged barracks in Downwind, and ignored the barriers the Beggar-king and his kind had erected. Ignored the PFLS and its flung stones and its naphtha-bottles and the fires: that demi-legion had seen the fires of hell and were not impressed. They had already passed the Yellow line, and they swaggered along Red territory, the winding streets of Downwind, with a swiftness no ordinary band could achieve, faster and faster.

"They're coming," Stilcho said to Haught, and the Nisi magus hardly liked the satisfaction in Stilcho's face. Haught snatched the skin of blood and shook out a few more drops to keep the Shambles-ghosts on the track-glanced a second time at Stilcho, thinking uncomfortably of treachery.

"Janni. Where's Janni? Have you located him?"

"Oh, I can guess where he'll go," Stilcho said.

"Roxane."

Stilcho laughed and grinned. He had a patched eye and was missing one tooth on the side, but in the dark when the scars showed less there was a ruined handsomeness about him. An elegance. He snatched the skin from Haught and hurled it, spattering the cobbles. "Run!" he yelled at Haught, and laughed aloud.

"Stilcho, damn you!"

"Try!" Stilcho yelled. Ghosts streamed and gibbered about them, swirled and whirled like bats, and Haught assessed the situation in an eyeblink and whipped his cloak about his arm and ran as if the fiends of hell were on his track. Stilcho howled. Slapped his knees. "Run, you friggin' bastard! Run, Nisi, run!" He would pay for it in the morning. Haught would see to that. But he had Her orders, direct.

He jogged off in the direction of the bridge, where a shadowy troop needed help passing running water. His old partner was in the lead and the company insignia was intact.

Behind him the ghosts did what everyone else in Sanctuary was busy doing: They chose sides and took cover and had at one another.

Stilcho turned his own troop up the riverside and through the streets-slower now, because they had a half-living man for a guide. But he would take them only so far. They would have no trouble with Walegrin's uptown barricades or the Stepsons' eastward; and they were not in a negotiating mood, having their murders recently in mind. Teach the uptowners their vulnerability -show the bastards who gave the orders that there were those who remembered their last orders and their last official mistakesHe jogged along, panting, limping-Ischade's repair work was thorough, but a long run still sent pain jolting through him.

Ghosts passed them, headed where they wished to be. They were polyglot and headed for old haunts, former domiciles, old feuds. Sanctuary might get pragmatic about its haunts, but the ghosts grew bolder and nervier in these declining days of the Empire; and these were not the reasoning kind. These had been walking patrol in Ischade's service, or Roxane's; and a few luckless ones tried to go complain to Roxane about the matter.

Roxane cursed a blue streak (literally) and in a paroxysm of rage conjured a dozen snakes and a demon, an orange-haired, grayskinned being named Snapper Jo which ran rampaging up the riverside till it forgot quite what it was about and got to rampaging through a warehouse full of beer. It was not, all in all, one of Roxane's better nights: the attack was desultory, Ischade was definitely aiming at something else, and Roxane was willing to use the diversion while she took wing crosstown"Damn!" Haught yelled. His sight picked that up, a pale blue arc headed across Sanctuary with only one target in mind. He was earthbound. He ran for the river and Ischade with all his might, and came pelting past the wards to find Ischade sitting on the bed wrapped in orange silk and the skirts of her black cloak and laughing like a lunatic.

Uptown the Lady Nuphtantei's door went wide open and the elegant Lady Nuphtantei, Harka Bey and not easily affrighted, went pelting down the street naked as she was born, for the drunken demon that had materialized in her house breaking porcelains and crunching silver underfoot was not a thing the servants or her daughter had stayed to deal with, not for a moment. She ran straight into a company of Walegrin's guard and kept going, so fast the guard hardly had time to turn and stare.

Then what was behind her showed up, and the troops scattered. Arrows flew. A barricade was afire over by the Maze edge where Jubal's gangs tried to hold against rooftop archers, mage-illusions, and a handful of paired riders who had the style and manner of the old Stepsons. And the fire spread to buildings, which doubled the chaos. Men threw water and ducked arrows. A frantic family scurried out with possessions and arrows pelted indiscriminate. The physician Harran wrung his hands (one was a woman's) and paced his upstairs room and took another look out the window, in the little garrett where he had hidden his affliction-fortuitously hidden, considering what had befallen everyone else in the barracks. But he had no practice now, no home, no direction. Mriga gone. There was the little dog, which paced about after him panting and whuffing in mimic concern.

He was (whatever his affliction) still a doctor. The pain he spied on worried at him and gnawed his gut. "Oh, damn," he muttered to himself, when a boy darted from cover, limned red in the firelight, and flung a torch. Tried to fling it. An arrow took him. The boy fell, writhing, skewered through the leg, right near the great artery. "Damn."

Herran slammed the shutter, shut his eyes and suddenly turned and ran down the stairs, thundering down the hollow boards, into the smell of smoke and the glare outside. He heard shouting, wiped his eyes. Heard the boy screaming above the roar of the burning barricade, above the shouts of men in combat. Horses screamed. He heard the thunder of hooves and dashed out to reach the boy as the riders streaked past. "Lie still," he yelled at the screaming, thrashing youth.

"Shut up!" He grabbed him about the arm and hauled it over his shoulders, heard a frantic barking and another great shout as he stumbled to his feet, the oncoming thunder of riders on the return, a solid wall of horsemen.

"Goddess-"

Strat met the shockwave of his own forces that had kept the way open: a moment of confusion while they swept about and followed him in a clatter on the pavings. The burning barricade was ahead, a sleet of stones. An uneven pair of figures blocked his path, dark against the lightStrat swept his sword in an arc that ended in the skull of the taller and took a good part of it away: he rode through. The rider behind him faltered as his horse hit the bodies and recovered; then the rest of the troop went over them, crushing bone under steel-shod hooves, and swords swung as they met Jubal's men at the barricade, on their way back through.

There was a decided interest on the childrens' part. One boy kept climbing up to the window and gazing out, less talkative than his wont. The other never left it, and stared when Niko came and took both in his arms. He saw the circling of something sorcerous that could not get in. Saw something dark stream up to fight it off, and that something was torn ragged and streamed on the winds. But what it had turned was dimmer fire now. He heard a forlorn cry, like a great hunting bird. Like a damned soul. A lost lover. The wards about the place glowed blinding bright. And held. Sanctuary was beset with fires, barricades, looting. The armed priests of the Storm God were no inconsiderable barrier themselves.