Storm Season

"I was out there this morning," Niko heard, bent down over his horse's left hind hoof, checking for splinters caught in its shoe; "heard your team lost a member, but not who. Pissass weird weather, these days. You know something I should know?"

"Possibly." Niko, putting down the hoof, brushed dust from his thighs and stood up. "Once when I was wandering around the backstreets of a coastal city-never mind which one-with an arrow in my gut and afraid to seek a surgeon's help there was weather like this. A man who took me in told me to stay off the streets at night until the weather'd been clear a full day-something to do with dead adepts and souls to pay their way out of purgatory. Tell your friends, if you've got any. And do me a favor, fair exchange?" He gathered up his reins and took a handful of mane, about to swing up on his horse, and thus he saw Hanse's fingers flicker: state it. So he did, admitting that he was lost, quite baldly, and asking the thief to guide him on his way.

When they had walked far enough that Shadowspawn's laughter no longer echoed, the thief said, "What's wrong? Like I said, I was out at the barracks. I've never seen him scared of anything, but he's scared of that girl he's got in his room. And he's meaner than normal-told me I couldn't stable my horse out there, and not to come around-" Shadowspawn broke off, having said what he did not want to say, and kicked a melon in their path, which burst open, showing the teeming maggots within.

"Maybe he'd like to keep you out of troubles that aren't any of your business. Or maybe he estimates his debt to you is paid in full-you can't keep coming around when it suits you and still be badmouthing us like any other Ilsig-"

A spurt of profanity contained some cogent directions to the Vulgar Unicorn, and some other suggestions impossible to follow. Niko did not look up to see Hanse go. If he failed to take the warning to heart, then hurt feelings would keep him away from Niko and his commander for a while. It was enough.

Directions or no, it took him longer than it should have to find his way. Finally, when he was eyeing the sky doubtfully, trying to estimate the lateness of the hour, he spied the Unicorn's autoerotic sign creaking in the moist, stinking breeze blowing in off the harbor. Discounting Hanse, since Niko had entered the close and ramshackle despair of the shantytown he had seen not one friendly face. If he had been jeered once, he had been cursed a score of times, aloud and with spit and glare and handsign, and he had had more than his fill of Sanctuary's infamous slum.

Within the Unicorn, the clientele did not look happy to see a Stepson. A silence as thick as Rankan ale descended as he entered and took more time to disperse than he liked. He crossed to the bar, sca

Niko stared at him, feeling anger chase the disquiet from his limbs. "I know you Ilsigs don't like us," he said quietly, "but I haven't time now to charm you into a change of mind. Where's One-Thumb, barkeep? I have a message for him that ca

"Right here," smirked the aproned mountain, tossing his rag onto the barsink's chipped pottery rim. "What is it, so

"He wants you to take me to the lady-you know the one." Actually, Tempus had instructed Niko to tell One-Thumb about Askelon's intention to confront Cime, and wait for word as to what the woman wanted Tempus to do. But he was resentful, and he was late." I have to be at the Mageguild by sundown. Let's move."

"You've got the wrong One-thumb, and the wrong idea. Who's this 'he'?"

"Bartender, I leave it on your conscience-" He pushed his mug away and took a step back from the bar, then realized he could not leave without discharging his duty, and reached out to pick it up again.

The big bartender's thumbless hand curled around his wrist and jerked him against the bar. He prayed for patience. "And he didn't tell you not to come in here, bold as brass tassels on a witch-bitch whore? He is getting sloppy, or he's forgotten who his friends are. Why didn't you come round the back? What do you expect me to do, leave with you in the middle of the day? I-"

"I was lucky I found your pisshole at all, Wriggly. Let me go or you're going to lose the rest of those fingers, sure as Lord Storm's anger rocks even this god ridden garbage heap of a peninsula-"

Someone stepped up to the bar, and One-Thumb, with a wrench of wrist, went to serve him, meanwhile motioning close a girl whose breasts were mottled gray with dirt and pinkish white where she had sweated it away, saying to her that Niko was to be taken to the office.

In it, he watched the man called One-Thumb through a one-way mirror, and fidgeted. Eventually, though he saw no reason why it happened, a door he had thought to be a closet's opened behind him, and a woman stepped in, clad in Ilsig doeskin leggings. She said, "What word did my brother send to me?"

He told her, thinking, watching her, that her eyes were gray like Askelon's, and her hair was arrestingly black and silver, and that she did not in any way resemble Tempus. When he was finished with his story and his warning that she not, under any circumstances, go out this evening-^not, upon her life, attend the Mageguild fete, she laughed, a sweet tinkle so inappropriate his spine chilled and he stiffened.

"Tell my brother not to be afraid. You must not know him well, to take his terror of the adepts so seriously." She moved close to him, and he drowned in her storm-cloud eyes while her hand went to his swordbelt and by it she pulled him close. "Have you money, Stepson? And some time to spend?"

Niko beat a hasty retreat with her mocking, throaty laughter chasing him down the stairs. She called after him that she only wanted to have him give her love to Tempus. As he made the landing near the bar, he heard the door at the stairs' top slam shut. He was out of there like a torqued arrow-so fast he forgot to pay for his drink, and yet, when he remembered it, on the street where his horse waited, no one had come chasing him. Looking up at the sky, he estimated he could just make the Mageguild in time, if he did not get lost again.

4

Thinking back over the last ten months, Tempus realized he should have expected something like this. Vashanka was weakening steadily: something had removed the god's name from Kadakithis' palace dome; the state cult's temple had proved unbuildable, its grounds defiled and its priest a defiler; the ritual of the Tenslaying had been interrupted by Cime and her fire, and he and Vashanka had begotten a male child upon the First Consort which the god did not seem to want to claim; Abarsis had been allowed to throw his life away without regard to the fact that he had been Vashanka's premier warrior priest. Now the field altar his mercenaries had built had been tumbled to the ground before his eyes by one of Abarsis' teachers, an entelechy chosen specifically to balance the beserker influence of the god. And he, Tempus, was imprisoned in his own quarters by a Froth Daughter in an all-too-human body intent on exacting from him recompense for what his sister had denied her.