"I do wish people wouldn't try to cheat me," he said. "Idiots, anyway, trying spells anymore. Nothing of this intensity works right."
With a sigh he turned. "Clean up this mess," he said to one of his men, "and tomorrow detach a work detail and raze this place. We can use the stone."
Then he went away to get some sleep. He had a long day tomorrow, on Stormbringer's business.
His men took the bodies away to the chamel house and left the place in darkness. One thing they did not take: one small form, wholly there now, in the darkness of the shadows beyond the moon; a shape like a small delicate dog, with too many lives sitting behind her eyes.
Tyr snarled, and got up, and walked out into the night to consider her vengeance.
SANCTUARY NOCTURNE by Lynn Abbey
Walegrin had his back to Sanctuary-vulnerable, unconcerned. One foot rested on a broken-off piling; his folded forearms rested on his upraised knee. His eyes were empty, staring at the still, starlit harbor, watching for the faint ripple that might mean a breeze coming up.
A thick blanket of sun-steamed air had clung to the city these last four days. Last winter they-the powers in the palace-had told him to paint false plague signs along the streets. Then, in a dry spring, pestilence had erupted from the stagnant sewers and only luck, or divine intervention, had saved Sanctuary from a purging. Now, as the dank, foul air leeched vitality from every living creature, plague season had come in earnest and the nabobs were worried. Worried so much that they fled from the palace and their townhouses to outlying estates, some no more than Ilsigi ruins, to await a change in the wind. Improvements to the city's long-neglected ramparts had ground to a halt, as stone, brick, and work-gangs were openly diverted to providing comfort and security to those rich enough, or powerful enough, to afford it.
But if plague did break out, their walls, atriums, and shaded verandas wouldn't protect them. So they told him, the garrison commander, to keep the guards out and alert. His men grumbled, preferring to slouch over a desultory dice game in the barracks, but he welcomed a chance to get away from the walls that trapped the heat of summer as surely as they did the frigid dampness of winter.
Sanctuary itself was quiet. No one was moving an unnecessary muscle. The Street of Red Lanterns, which he had patrolled, had been almost deserted. Few men would pay to touch sweat-slicked flesh on a night like this.
It was ironic, in a way, that after a year or more of wizard-witched weather, the Street talk was about the failure of magic. Most of the brothels-the big houses like the Aphrodisia, anyway-usually bought cool night breezes from the journeymen up at the Mageguild, but this summer (a summer that was really no worse than any other) the big magic-banded doors stayed shut and the Hazard mages, when they were seen at all, were sweating through their robes like any common laborer.
Rumor said the worst was over and the magic was coming back, though only to the strongest, or the cursed, and as yet too unpredictable to sell at any price. Rumor said a lot of things, but Walegrin, who did Molin Torchholder's direct bidding, got the truth of them sometimes. Stormbringer's pillar, which had purged Sanctuary of its dead and deadly, had sucked away the ether that made magic work. It would be a dog's year before Sanctuary's Mageguild sold anything but charlatan spells or prestidigitation regardless of the hazardous ranking of its residents.
The black harbor water diffracted into diamonds of starlight; a breeze moved whisper-weak across the wharf. The ragged-eared cats with slitted sickly green eyes were stretched out along the damp planks. A mouse, or young rat, skittered up a mooring rope past a cat that didn't care enough to twitch its tail. If a man held still, like the cats-breathing slow, keeping his mind as calm as the water-he could forget the .heat and slip into a timeless daze that was almost pleasant.
Walegrin sought that oblivion and it eluded him. He was a Rankan soldier, the garrison commander, self-charged with patrolling the city. Such pride as he had stemmed from his ability to fulfill his duties. So his mind churned forward, pursuing the thoughts he'd lost before sunset. He had an appointment to keep: the true reason why tonight, more than any other, he rather than one of his men was making the rounds of Sanctuary's alleys.
The summer had seen a change in the city's social fabric that was as profound as it had been unexpected: Official protection had been extended to, and accepted by, the besieged remnants of the PFLS after their leader was betrayed and nearly killed within the palace walls. Gutter-fighters like Zip, whose lives had been measured in hours and minutes at the season's beginning, now dwelt in the Stepson barracks beyond Downwind and sweated hot and cold under the tutelage of Tempus's lieutenants.
And the cause of this change? None other than Prince Kadakithis's once-favorite cousin and Molin's never-favored niece: Chenaya Vigeles, a young woman of considerable talent and little sense. A young woman who had propositioned him with treason and upon whom, with the knowledge and permission of his superiors, Walegrin now spied.
Once, not so long ago, he had discounted the influence of women both in his own life and in the greater realities of the universe; then he had returned to Sanctuary. In this gods- and magic-cursed place, the worst always came from a woman's hand. He'd learned to hold his tongue and his liquor with women whose naked breasts stared back at him; women whose eyes glowed red with immortal anger and women whose love-play left a man dead in the dawn light-and all of them were saner than Chenaya.
Rumor said, and the Torch confirmed, that she was favored of Savankala himself. Rumor said she couldn't lose, whatever that meant, because she and the few frightened remnants of an unlamented Imperial dynasty had fled the Rankan capital after Theron's takeover and wound up here in Sanctuary which had never been known to attract anything or anyone but losers. But it meant something Walegrin knew that personally. And out at the Land's End estate, where she lived with her father, a small horde of gladiators, and the disaffected members of what had been the city's Rankan upper crust, there was a god-bugged priest who was determined to make a mortal goddess of her.
He'd seen the shrine Rashan was building, with stones pilfered not only from the ramparts but from long-neglected, best-forgotten altars. He'd passed the word along to Molin and watched his mentor seethe with rage, but he hadn't managed to pass along the danger-the awesomeness-he felt when Rashan made his Daughter-of the-Sun speeches or when Chenaya took him into her confidence and arms.
The water diffracted again, broken as a school of minnows scattered through a larger, slow-spreading circular ripple. Walegrin shed his reverie and stretched himself erect. His leather baldric, all he wore above the waist, slimed across his spine; the illusion of equilibrium between his flesh and the air vanished. He wiped the sweat-sheen from his forehead then wiped his hand on the limp homespun of his kilt. A nya-fish spread its fins, arching above the water to outrace the fleeing minnows. Walegrin slid the baldric into position and turned back to the city.