Wings of Omen

"Aah, you want corpses," Grian said in mild disgust, elbow-deep in the chest cavity of a floater. "We're havin' a plague of 'em. And the Shalpa-be-damned murderers hain't even got the courtesy to be half-decent quiet about it. Look at this poor soul. Third one in the last two days. A few stones around his feet and into the White Foal with him. Didn't the body who threw him in know that a few cobbles won't keep 'em down when the rot sets in and the bloatin' and bubblin' starts? You'd think they wanted the body t' be found. It's these damn Piffles, that's what it is. Public Liberation Front, they call themselves? Public nuisance, I call 'em. City ought to do somethin'."

Harran nodded, keeping his retches to himself. Grian had supplied Siveni's priests with many an alley-rolled corpse for anatomy instruction, back in the white-and-gold times. He was the closest thing Harran had to a friend these days- probably the only man in Sanctuary who knew what Harran had been before he'd been a barber.

Grian paused to take a long swig out of the wine jar Harran had brought for him, "liberated" from the Stepsons' store. "Stuffy in here today," he said, wiping his forehead and waving a hand vaguely in front of him.

Harran nodded, holding his breath hard as the stench went by his face. "Stuffy" was a mild word for the Chamel House at noon on a windless day. Grian drank again, put the jug down with a satisfied thump between the corpse's splayed legs, and picked up a rib-spreader. "No lead in that" Grian said with relish, eyeing the wine. "Watch you don't get caught."

"I'll be careful," Harran said, without inhaling.

"You want nice fresh corpses quietlike," Grian said, bending close and forcing his wine-laden growl down to a rumble, "you go try that vacant lot over by the old Downwind gravepit. The lot just north of there, by th' empty houses. Put a few in there myself just the other night. Been puttin' all the bad 'uns in there, all the hangings, for the last fortnight. Ran out of space in the old gravepit. Damn Fish-Faces have been busy 'cleaning up the city' for their fine ladies."

The last two words were pronounced with infinite scorn; Grian might be a corpse-cutter and part-time gravedigger, but he had been "brought up old -fashioned," and did not approve of women, fish-faced or otherwise, who went around in broad daylight wearing nothing above the waist but paint. By his lights, there were more appropriate places for that kind of thing.

"You give it a try," Grian said, hauling out a lung like a sodden, reeking sponge, and tossing it with a grimace into the pail on the floor. "Take a shovel, boy. But you needn't dig deep; we been in a hurry to get all the customers handled; they none of them more'n two foot down, just 'nough to hide the smell. Here now, look at this...."

Harran pleaded a late night's work and made his escape.

The hour before midnight found him slipping through the shadows, down that dismal Downwind street. He went armed with knife and short sword, and (to any assailant's probable confusion) with a trowel; but he turned out not to need more than one of the three. Grian had been wrong about the smell.

The hour before midnight, one death-knell stroke on the gongs of Ils's temple, was Harran's signal. He got to work, going about on hands and knees on the uneven ground, which felt lumpy as a coverlet with many unwilling bedfellows under it-brushing his hands through the dirt, feeling for the small stiff shoot he wanted.

In the comer of the yard he found one. For fear of losing it in the dark (since he might show no light if the root was to work) he sat down by it, and waited. The wind came up. Midnight struck, and with it came the mandrake's swift flower, white as a dead man's turned-up eye. It blossomed, and shed its cold sweet fragrance on the air, and died. Harran began to dig.

How long he knelt there in the wretched stink and the cold, blindfolded with silk and tugging at the struggling root, Harran wasn't sure. And he stopped caring about the time as he heard something drawing near in the darkness another rustle of silk, not his. The rustle paused. Hard after the silken susurrus came another sort of whisper, the sound of a breath of wind sinking down around him and dying away.

Harran couldn't take off the blindfold-no man may see the unharmed mandrake root and live. By itself, that was reassuring to him; any assailant would not survive the attempt. So, though the sweat broke out on him and chilled him through, Harran hacked away at the root with the leaden trowel, and finally cut through it, pulling the mandrake free. The maimed root shrieked, a sound so bizarre that the huddled wind leaped up in panic and blundered about among the graves for a few moments-then dove for cover again, leaving Harran twice as cold as he had been before.

He yanked off his blindfold, stared around him, and saw two sights. One was the twitching, writhing, man-shaped root, its scream dying to a whisper as it stiffened. The other stood across the cemetery from him, a form robed and hooded all in black. That form stared at him silently from the darkness of the hood, a long look; and Harran understood quite well what had frightened even the cold night wind into going to ground.

The black shape slipped pale arms out of the graceful draping of the robe, raised them to put the hood back. She looked at him-the lovely, olive-ski

He waited, sweating. He had never seen anything so dangerous in his life, not Tempus on a rampage, or thunderous Vashanka striking the city, lightning fashion, with testy miracles.

She tilted that elegant head, finally, and blinked. "Rest easy," she said ridiculous reassurance, delivered in a quiet voice laced with lazy mockery. "You're not even nearly my type. But brave-digging that root here, at this hour, with your own hand, instead of using some dog to pull it for you. Brave-or desperate. Or very, very foolhardy."

Harran swallowed. "The latter, madam," he said at last, "most definitely bandying words with you. And as for the root-foolhardy there too. Yes. But the other way, it's barely a third as effective. I could send away to an herb-dealer or magician for the man-dug root. But who knows when it would get here? And at any rate-in gold or some other currency-the price of the danger would still have to be paid."

She regarded him a moment more, than laughed very softly. "A knowledgeable practitioner," she said. "But this... commodity... has most specific uses. In this time, this place, only three. There are cheaper cures for impotence-not that your present bedfellow would even notice it. And murder is far more easily done with poison. The third use-"

She paused, waited to see what he would do. Harran snatched up the mandrake and clutched it in a moment's irrationality-then realized that the worst that could happen would be that she would kill him. Or not. He dropped the mandrake into his simple-bag, and dusted off his hands. "Madam," Harran said, "I've no fear of you taking it from me. A thief you may be, but you're far beyond the need for such crude tools."

"Have a care," Ischade whispered, the soft mockery still in her voice.

"Madam, I do." He was shaking as he said it. "I know you don't care much for priests. And I know you protect your prerogatives-all Sanctuary remembers that night-" He swallowed. "But I have no plans to raise the dead. Or-not dead men."