as he does his horses; he needs a gentle hand.'
'He needs his comeuppance. He has become insufferable! What is this money? Has he told you I am for sale? I am not!'
'He has turned his back on his god and the god is letting him run. When he is exhausted, the god will take him back. You found him pleasant enough, previously, I would wager. He has been set upon by your own staff, men to whom he was sworn and who gave oaths to him. What do you expect? He will not rest easy until he has made that matter right.'
'What is this? My men? You mean that long unexplained absence of his? I admit he is changed. But how do you know what he would not tell me?'
A smile like sunrise lit the elegant face of the armoured man.
'The god tells me what I need to know. How would it be, for him to come running to you with tales of feuding among your ranks like a child to his father? His honour precludes it. As for the ... funds ... you hold, when we Sent him here, it was with the understanding that should he feel you would make a king, he would so inform us. This, I was told you knew.'
'In principle. But I cannot take a gift so large.'
'Take a loan, as others before you have had to do. There is no time now for courtship. To be capable of becoming a king ensures no seat of kingship, these days. A king must be more than a man, he must be a hero. It takes many men to make a hero, and special times. Opportunities approach, with the up-country insurrection and a new empire rising beyond the northern range. Were you to distinguish yourself in combat, or field an army that did, we who seek a change could rally around you publicly. You cannot do it with what you have, the Emperor has seen to that.'
'At what rate am I expected to pay back this loan?'
'Equal value, nothing more. If the prince, my lord, will have patience, I will explain all to Your Majesty's satisfaction. That, truly, is why I am come.'
'Explain away, then.'
'First, one small digression, which touches a deeper truth. You must have some idea who and what the man you call Tempus is. I am sure you have heard it from your wizards and from his enemies among the officials of the Mageguild. Let me add to that this: Where he goes, the god scatters His blessings. By the cosmological rules of state cult and kingship. He has invested this endeavour with divine sanction by his presence. Though he and the god have their differences, without him no chance remains that you might triumph. My father found that out. Even sick with his curse, he is too valuable to waste, unappreciated. If you would rather remain a princeling forever, and let the empire slide into ruin apace, just tell me and I will take word home. We will forget this matter of the kingship and this corollary matter of a small standing army, and I will release Tempus. He would as soon it, I assure you.'
'Your father? Who in the God's Eye are you?'
'Ah, my arrogance is unforgivable; I thought you would know me. We are all so full of ourselves these days, it is no wonder events have come to such a pass. 1 am Man of the God in Upper Ranke, Sole Friend to the Mercenaries, the Hero, Son of the Defender, and so forth.'
'High Priest of Vashanka.'
'In the Upper Land.'
'My family and yours thinned each other's line,' stated Kadakithis baldly, no apology, no regret in his words. Yet he looked differently upon the other, thinking they were of an age, both wielding wooden swords in shady courts while the slaughter raged, far off at the fronts.
'Unto eradication,' remarked the dark young man. 'But we did not contest, and now there is a different enemy, a common threat. It is enough.'
'And you and Tempus have never met?'
'He knew my father. And when I was ten, and my father died and our armies were disbanded, he found a home for me. Later, when I came to the god and the mercenaries' guild, I tried to see him. He would not meet with me.' He shrugged, looking over his shoulder at the man walking the blue-grey horse into blue-grey shadows falling over the blue-black sea. 'Everyone has his hero, you know. A god is not enough for a whole man; he craves a fleshly model. When he sent to me for a horse, and the god approved it, I was elated. Now, perhaps, I can do more. The horse may not have died in vain, after all.'
'I do not understand you. Priest.'
'My Lord, do not make me too holy. I am Vashanka's priest: I know many requiems and oaths, and thirty-three ways to fire a warrior's bier. They call me Stepson, in the mercenaries' guild. I would be pleased if you would call me that, and let me talk to you at greater length about a future in which your destiny and the wishes of the Storm God, our Lord, could come to be the same.'
'I am not sure I can find room in my heart for such a god; it is difficult enough to pretend to piety,' grated Kadakithis, squinting after Tempus in the dusk.
'You will, you will,' promised the priest, and dismounted from his horse to approach Tempus's ground-tied sorrel. Abarsis reached down, running his hand along the beast's white-stocking'd leg. 'Look, Prince,' he said, craning his neck up to see Kadakithis's face as his fingers tugged at the gold chain wedged in the weight-cleat on the horse's shoe. At the end of the chain, sandy but shining gold, was an amulet. 'The god wants him back.'
3
The mercenaries drifted into Sanctuary dusty from their westward trek or blue lipped from their rough sea passage and wherever they went they made hellish what before had been merely dissolute. The Maze was no longer safe for pickpocket or pander; usurer and sorcerer scuttled in haste from street to doorway, where before they had swaggered virtually unchallenged, crime lords in fear of nothing.
Now the whores walked bowlegged, dreamy-eyed, parading their new finery in the early hours of the morning while most mercenaries slept; the taverns changed shifts but feared to close their doors, lest a mercenary find that an excuse to take offence. Even so early in the day, the inns were full of brawls and the gutters full of casualties. The garrison soldiers and the Hell Hounds could not be omnipresent: wherever they were not, mercenaries took sport, and they were not in the Maze this morning.
Though Sanctuary had never been so prosperous, every guild and union and citizens' group had sent representatives to the palace at sunrise to complain.
Lastel, a.k.a. One-Thumb, could not understand why the Sanctuarites were so unhappy. Lastel was very happy: he was alive and back at the Vulgar Unicorn tending bar, and the Unicorn was making money, and money made Lastel happy, always. Being alive was something Lastel had not fully appreciated until recently, when he had spent aeons dying a subjective death in thrall to a spell he had paid to have laid upon his own person, a spell turned against him by the sons of its deceased creator, Mizraith of the Hazard class, and dispelled by he knew not whom. Though every night he expected his mysterious benefactor to sidle up to the bar and demand payment, no one ever came and said: 'Lastel, I saved you. I am the one. Now show your gratitude.' But he knew very well that someday soon, someone would. He did not let this irritation besmirch his happiness. He had got a new shipment of Caronne krrf (black, pure drug, foil stamped, a full weight of it, enough to set every mercenary in Sanctuary at the kill) and it was so good that he considered refraining from offering it on the market. Having considered, he decided to keep it all for himself, and so was very happy indeed, no matter how many fistfights broke out in the bar, or how high the sun was, these days, before he got to bed ...