And Crit had stared boldly at her across the table in the safe house, knowing already whom Tempus was intending to name as commander- in-chief of Sanctuary's disparate armed forces. Knowing she'd have to come to him, be under his command.
It stank. She kicked her roan and slapped its poll and, under diverse and punitive instruction, it settled down. Jogging beside the half-drunken Straton toward the river, she wished she was anywhere else, doing any- thing else. Trying to keep Zip from making this sort of mistake wasn't her job, but Crit's.
Straton knew that, too, but hadn't voiced it. Crit was head of the combined militias, including the fifty grunts that made up Walegrin's regular army barracks, but Zip, like Aye-Gophlan, was an undercom- mander, responsible for the second and third shifts each day.
Only Crit, or someone from the palace hierarchy, could tell Zip to leave the riverside altar be and make it stick.
But Kama would die before she went to Crit and asked him to solve a problem she couldn't. Bringing Strat into it made the message she was sending the more clear: We who love you won't be treated this way. You've snubbed us both for your precious command, now live with it. But don't expect us to bow and scrape.
Strat had wanted Sanctuary's commission, should have had it. Crit couldn't have wanted it less, so he got it. And that kept the vampire with her hidden agenda out of things, but at a personal cost only Tempus could have decreed. Only Tempus, who had no conscience, could split a Sacred Band pair like he'd split the love-match that had once been Kama and Critias.
Suddenly, she found her eyes blurry. She swiped impatiently at them with the back of her forearm. She couldn't afford emotion now; it clouded her judgment. Her anticipation of men was generally good. Of Critias, it was woefully inadequate.
Of Strat, her forewarning was little better. Or maybe it was just the fact that Strat was drunk and his horse a numinous creature that caused them to take a shortcut over the White Foal Bridge and down a road leading past Ischade's Foalside home.
Zip was transported, in an altered state where every night noise was new and hostile, down by the White Foal's edge where he could barely see the eerie lights from Ischade's house up the bank. He had a wheelbar- row and, at the bank's crest, a wagon. He had three of his militia guard- ing the wagon, but he'd permitted none to come down here. Not to the shrine.
No one should touch the piled stones but him, the thing he served had told him. As it had told him to bring it blood, and worse, it had decreed the time and manner of its uptown move. It wanted to live on the Street of Temples, with the gods. Zip had found it a place, an alley behind the Rankan Storm God's temple, and there it swore it would be content to stay.
And he'd found it a new sacrifice, a special gift that one of his girls had brought him. The girl wanted a job on the Street of Lanterns and deliver- ance from Ratfall. In exchange for what she'd found on the Downwind beach, Zip was happy to oblige. The red-eyed thing that lived inside the stones would tike its new gift, Zip was sure.
He hunkered down beside the knee-high pile and said, "Look here, Lord, I've got a present for you, when we're moved. But now I've got to start on the stones, by myself if you won't let my boys help."
He waited for a reply, but only a glimpse of a burning red eye and a sound like shifting weight came to him in response.
What was it he served here? Most times, it didn't speak. He was prompted without words to do this or that. He'd get a feeling of a pres- ence, and the things he brought it-pieces of human flesh, skins of warm blood, precious baubles-would disappear. Was it inimical only to Rankans, or to everyone? He wanted it to be his friend. He wanted it to be the Ilsigs' friend, guardian of the revolution, since he was bound to have one.
He wanted it to show itself, magnificent and powerful, and help bring down Zip's enemies. So far, all it had done was take the sacrifices, give him bad dreams, and let him know it wanted to move uptown.
So did they all. So did all of Zip's Ratfall movers, everyone trapped in the Maze and policed to wits* end. So did the twelve-year-old mothers and one-legged fathers of Zip's revolution, which he'd never wanted. He might have disavowed the struggle if Tempus hadn't tagged him. But Tempus had.
Zip didn't understand why the Rankan powers wanted Zip's help, or the PFLS on its side. The Rankans wouldn't believe that there really wasn 't a PFLS when he tried to explain that a score of gang members with lamb's blood and paintbrushes didn't make a political movement.
But since his thieves and mendicants would receive the protection of what police Crit had in Sanctuary if they took the night shift, and Zip took responsibility, his entry into the power structure and polite ... society ... had just happened.
It wasn't being co-opted by the enemy that bothered him the most. What bothered him the most was that his bad boys and girls were doing exactly what they'd done before-extort, blackmail, roust and rough- house, bum and plunder-and doing it now with the protection and for the benefit of the state.
It didn't make any sense, until it made all the sense in the world. And when Zip realized what Tempus had done to him, it had been too late. Zip was already part of the establishment, a hated enforcer, a dog with a Rankan collar, and his militia no better than any of the cannon fodder in Walegrin's demoralized army. They hadn't triumphed over the opposi- tion, they had become it.
They weren't the revolution, they were the sustaining force behind the injustice that had created them.
When he'd said that-shouted it, actually-to Crit in fury, the cynical Stepson had flashed white teeth and said, "The more things change, pud, the more they stay the same. What's your problem? Not having fun now that you're legal? It's all your type knows how to do, and this way you won't end up handiess or headless because of it. You're talent, and we're the talent scouts. Thank your slime gods you've been discovered and put to work before you ended up greasing some slaver's wagon wheels."
That was another thing that bothered Zip: Critias seemed to know more about Zip's affairs than anybody could. "Slime gods" was an obvi- ous reference to the altar. And as for the slavers ... Zip had sold more than one soul down that river of sighs, to finance the revolution. But then it had been a matter of conscience. Now it was a godsdamned state business, for pork's sake.
Gayle, the 3rd commando liaison man, had told him not to mind it, just make his list of expendables. He hated himself these days, as much as he hated Kama, the twit who had gotten him mixed up in all this, and her damned 3rd Commando ethos that excused the foulest misdeeds as exigencies. "Whatever works" might work for the Riddler's daughter and her lot of death dealers, but it didn't work for Zip.
Especially when, if he wasn't careful, he was going to become just like them. So here he had this altar, this god or whatever it was, this eater of sacrifices that never exactly said it could expiate his sins, wipe him clean, but surely must mean it. It was the thing in the altar with its red eyes that was making him believe there was some method to all his madness. It had a plan. It wanted Zip to infiltrate the Rankans and the Beysibs, to leam how to command and the weaknesses of their joint enemies. It was a living thing in there-or at least a real thing, which other gods weren't, as far as Zip could tell. It had wants and needs.
It wanted flesh and it needed blood and it wanted to move uptown and it needed Zip to be the militia commander to serve it.'He had to serve something. He couldn't justify what he and his little band of rebels were doing otherwise. He had to have a Cause and the red eyes in the altar, the slurping sound of fresh blood being drunk and the godlike belches after- wards, these were his Cause.