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'Assuredly not, except that I will outlive you. And I will make sure you do not get your requisite burial ritual.'
'You would not!'
'Like you said, I yet bear my grudge - against every one of you.'
With a curse that made the ranks clap their hands to their helmeted ears, the archmage swished into the street, across it, and through the door marked 'Men' without another word. It was his motioned command which made the troops follow.
A waitress Tempus knew came out when the gibbous moon was high, to ask him if he was hungry. She brought him fish and he ate it, watching the doors.
When he had just about finished, a terrible rumble crawled up the street, tremors following in its wake. He slid from his horse and held its muzzle, and the reins up under its bit. The doors of Vashanka's Weaponshop grew shimmery, began taking colour. Above, the moon went behind a cloud. The little dome on the" shop rocked, grew cracks, crazed, steamed. The doors were ruby red, and melting. Awful wails and screams and the smell of sulphur and ozone filled the night.
Patrons began streaming out of the Vulgar Unicorn, drinks in hand. They stayed well back from the rocking building, which howled as it stressed larger, growing turgid, effluescing spectrums which sheeted and snapped and snarled. The doors went molten white, then they were gone. A figure was limned in the left-hand doorway, and it was trying to climb empty air. It flamed and screeched, dancing, crumbling, facing the street but unable to pass the invisible barrier against which it pounded. It stank: the smell of roasting flesh was overwhelming. Behind it, helmets crumpled, dripped on to the contorted faces of soldiers whose moustaches had begun to flare.
The mage who tried to break down the invisible door had no fists; he had pounded them away. The ranks were char and ash in infalling effigy of damnation. The doors which had been invisible began to cool to white, then to gold, then to red.
The street was utterly silent. Only the snorts of his horse and the squeals of the domed structure could be heard. The squeals fell off to growls and shudders. The doors cooled, turned dark.
People muttered, drifted back into the Unicorn with mumbled wardings, tracing signs and taking many backward looks.
Tempus, who could have saved thirty i
He had to be at the Lily Garden soon.
When he got there, the mixed elation of drug and death had faded.
What if Shadowspawn did not appear with the rods? What if the girl Cime did not come to get them back? What if he still could hurt, as he had not hurt for more than three hundred years?
He had had a message from the palace, from Prince Kadakithis himself. He was not going up there, just yet. He did not want to answer any questions about the archmage's demise. He did not want to appear involved. His only chance to help the Prince-Governor effectively lay in working his own way. Those were his terms, and under those terms Kitty's supporters in the Rankan capital had employed him to come down here and play Hell Hound and see what he would do. There were no wars, anywhere. He had been bored, his days stretching out never ending, bleak. So he had concerned himself with Kitty, for something to do. The building of Vashanka's temple he oversaw for himself more than Kadakithis, who understood the necessity of elevating the state cult above the Ilsig gods, but believed only in wizardry, and his noble Ranke blood.
He was not happy about the spectacle at Vashanka's Weapon-shop. Sloppy business, this side-show melting and unmelting. The archmage must have been talented, to make his struggles visible to those outside.
Wisdom is to know the thought which steers all things through all things, a friend of his who was a philosopher had once said to him. The thought that was steering all things through Sanctuary was muddled, unclear.
That was the hitch, the catch, the problem with employing the supernatural in a natural milieu. Things got confused. With so many spells at work, the fabric of causality was overly strained. Add the gods, and Evil and Good faced each other across a board game whose extent was the phenomenal world. He wished the gods would stay in their heavens and the sorcerers in their hells.
Oh, he had heard endless persiflage about simultaneity; iteration - the constant redefining of the now by checking it against the future-; alchemical laws of consonance. When he had been a student of philosophy and Cime had been a maiden, he had learned the axiom that Mind is unlimited and self-controlled, but all other things are co
The sorcerers put it another way: they called the consciousness of all things into service, according to the laws of magic.
Not philosophy, nor theology, nor thaumaturgy held the answer for Tempus; he had turned away from them, each and all. But he could not forget what he had learned.
And none of the adepts like to admit that no servitor can be hired without wages. The wages of u
He wished he could wake up in Azehur, with his family, and know that he had dreamed this impious dream.
But instead he came to Amoli's whorehouse, the Lily Garden. Almost, but not quite, he rode the horse up its stairs. Resisting the temptation, he reflected that in every age he had ever studied, doom-criers abounded. No millenium is attractive to the man immured in it; enough prophecies have been made in antiquity that one who desires, in any age, to take the position that Apocalypse is at hand can easily defend it. He would not join that dour Order; he would not worry about anything but Tempus, and the matter awaiting his attention.
Inside Amoli's, Hanse the thief sat in full swagger, a pubescent girl on each knee.
'Ah,' he waved. 'I have something for you.' Shadowspawn tumbled both girls off of him, and stood, stretching widely, so that every arm-dagger and belted sticker and thigh-sheath creaked softly. The girls at his feet stayed there, staring up at Tempus wide-eyed. One whimpered to Shadowspawn and clutched his thigh.
'Room key,' Tempus snapped to no one in particular, and held out his hand. The concierge, not Amoli, brought it to him.
'Hanse?'
'Coming.' He extended a hand to one girl.
'Alone.'
'You are not my type,' said the thief, suspicious.
'I need just a moment of your evening. You can do what you wish with the rest.'
Tempus looked at the key, headed off towards a staircase leading to the room which bore a corresponding number.
He heard the soft tread of Shadowspawn close behind.
When the exchange had been made, the thief departed, satisfied with both his payment and his gratuity, but not quite sure that Tempus appreciated the trouble to which he had put himself, or that he had got the best of the bargain they had made.
He saw the woman he had robbed before she saw him, and ended up in a different girl's room than the one he had chosen, in order to avoid a scene. When he had heard her steps pass by, stop before the door behind which the big Hell Hound waited, he made preclusive threats to the woman whose mouth he had stopped with the flat of his hand, and slipped downstairs to spend his money somewhere else, discreetly.
If he had stayed, he might have found out what the diamond rods were really worth; he might have found out what the sour-eyed mercenary with his high brow, suddenly so deeply creased, and his lightly carried mass, which seemed tonight too heavy, was worried about. Or perhaps he could have fathomed Tempus's enigmatic parting words: 'I would help you if I could, backstreeter,' Tempus had rumbled.