Wings of Omen

"You didn't have to hire me," she said. "Not for Roxane. That matter's free."

"I can get help." He recalled his wits and his purpose. "Get a message down there, move those ships to open water-"

"She'd eat you alive, Stepson. There's one she won't. One she can't touch. Make a little haste. You're late. Where did you go? The house?"

"The house- When-sent for me? Is Vis yours?"

"He has bad dreams."

He blinked. Balked. She drew him on. "Damn," he muttered, "could have had a horse-it's the other damn side of the bridge- We've got to pass under the checkpoint, dammit-"

"They won't notice. They never do."

They walked, walked, and the wind whipped the trees to a roar. Thunder boomed. Late, she had said; waiting on him, and late-

"For what?" he asked, out of breath. "For what-waiting on me?"

"I might have used Vis. But I don't trust him any longer- at my back. There'll be snakes. I trust you're up to snakes-"

The brush opened out on the terrace edge that became a rubble slope. The bridge was ahe'ad, the few shielded lights by the bridgehead still aglow on the Sanctuary side of the Foal. Rocks turned, clashed beneath hastening steps slipped and rattled.

They'll not see us. They never do-

He was out of breath now. He was not sure about Ischade, whose hand held his and urged him faster, faster, while the wind whipped at her cloak and threw his hair into his eyes.

"Damn, we're too late-"

"Hush." Nails bit into his hand. They passed beneath the bridge. He looked up and looked forward again as a rock rattled which they had not moved, faint in the wind and the river-sound.

A man was in the shadow. Strat snatched his hand toward his sword, but an outflung hand, a black wave of Ischade's cloak was in the way: "It's Stilcho," Ischade said.

He let the sword fall home again. "More help?" he asked. If there had not already been a chill down his back, this was enough: Stepson, this one was... one of the best of the ersatz Stepsons they'd left behind; gods, one he'd well approved. Haunting the bridge-side. There was something appropriate in that; it was from this place the beggar-king had got him.

Dead, Vis swore. Stilcho had died that night.

Thunder rumbled. "Closer," Ischade said, glancing skyward as they passed out of bridge-shadow, three, where they had been two. Stars were still overhead, but in the south there were continued lightnings and rumblings; winds shivered up the Foal, roared in the trees downriver, on the further, southern, terraces.

Beside him now, a dead man walked. It looked his way once that he caught, with its one remaining eye, its ungodly pallor. It went swathed in black, except the hood; a young man's dark hair-Stilcho had been vain-still well-kept. Gods, what did it want-camaraderie?

He turned his back to it and slogged ahead, up the slope. Ischade drifted wraithlike before him, shadow-black against the shadow of the brush up-terrace, till she was lost in it. He struggled the harder, heard Stilcho laboring behind like death upon his track.

Lightning cracked. He crested the slope and Ischade was there, at his elbow, seizing on his arm.

"Snakes," she reminded him. "Go softly."

In the roar of the gathering storm.

The wind whirled in the window and the room went dark with the death of candles, except the fire in the hearth. "Reverence," the servant said, a small voice, insistent; below, in the perspective from the hill, all Sanctuary had just gone dark, what lights there were whipped out in the face of that oncoming wall; the very stars went out. There was for light only the flicker of the lightnings in the oncoming mass of cloud.

"Reverence."

He turned at the tug on his sleeve, saw in the dim firelight there was left the apparition of a palace guard, disheveled, windblown. "Zaibar?"

"Reverence-two of the patrol came back-someone hit them. Some could have gotten through; they don't know. They lost another man on the way back-"

"Reverence-" Another guard came pelting in at Zaibar's heels, breaking past the servants. "There's fire in the Aglain storehouse-"

"That's one." Kama let fly and missed the sulking figure. Wind carried the shot astray; the dark figure dived past, along the quay where fishing boats rocked and thumped together. The dark hulks of the Beysib ships leaned drun-kenly and strained at cables out in the cha

She slid and bumped down to the stack of boxes, one-handed by reason of the bow, caught herself again, leaped down and came up on her feet-

-face on with a clutch of Beysib.

"Out of here!" she yelled, waving with the bow. "Out, move it-"

They jabbered their own tongue at her. One broke away; the others did, like so many mice before the fire, ru

A second shadow thumped down beside her, her partner, with an arrow nocked. "Lunatics," he said. Riot on the docks and the Beysib ran straight into the middle of it, fluttering and twittering-

A Beysib dropped. One of the snipers had scored with something; other Beysib reached the water, peeled out of garments like thistledown leaving pods-pale bodies arced toward the water-one, and three, and five, a dozen or more.

"Look at that!" her partner said. For a moment she did nothing but look, thinking it suicide (she was no swimmer, and the water was wild and black).

"Their ships-damn, they're going for their ships-"

They had guts-after all: Beysib amazed her; Beysib seamen, risking their lives out there.

The wind roared, making the trees creak. A limb cracked and fell; the smaller debris of old leaves and wind-stripped twigs rode the cold edge of the gusts. Left to right the wind blew here, about the ramshackle dwelling whose lights gleamed balefire red through the murk.

Here they crouched, here in this snake-infested outland, in the wind's howl and the lightning's crack.

"Vashanka's gone," Strat protested, his last faith in any logic shredded in the wind. "Gone-"

"The lack of a god also has its consequence," Ischade said. Her hood had blown back. Her hair streamed like ink in the dark. Lightning lit her face, and her eyes when she turned his way shone like hell itself. "Chaos, for instance. Petty usurpers."

"We going in there?" It was the last place Strat wanted to go, but he had his sword in hand and the shreds of his courage likewise. Inside might be warm. For the moment they lived. And here his bones were freezing.

"Patience," said Ischade; and holding out her hand: "Stil-cho. It's time."

There was silence. Strat wiped his tearing eyes and turned his head. The steady flicker of lightnings showed a masklike face set in horror. "-No," Stilcho said. "No-I don't want-"

"You're essential, Stilcho. You know that. I know you know the way."

"I don't want to-" Childlike, quavering.

"Stilcho."

And he tumbled down, facedown, a dead weight that collapsed against Strat's side, utterly limp. Strat flinched aside in a paroxysm of revulsion, held his balance on his sword-hand, and blinked in the sting of wind and leaves. "Dammit "

But Ischade's voice came to him through the dark: "... fmd him, Stilcho, find him: bring him up-he'll come. He'll come. He'll come^-"

He made the mistake of lifting his head, looking up just where a thing materialized-a thing ribboned red and nothing-surely-ever human; but he knew its face, had known it for years and years.