The face of chaos - Thieves World 05 Read Free Page B

hope. We've sent slave-bait to her and lost it. Like a canny carp, she takes the bait and leaves the hook.' Crit's lips were pursed as if his wine had turned to vinegar; his patrician nose drew down with his frown. He ran a hand through his short, feathery hair. 'And our joint venture with the Rankan garrison is impeding rather than aiding success. Army Intelligence is a contradiction in terms, like the Mygdonian Alliance or the Sanctuary pacification programme. The cutthroats I've got on our payroll are sure the god is dead and all the Rankans soon to follow. The witch - or some witch - floats rumours of Mygdonian liberators and Ilsig freedom and the gullible believe. That snotty thief you befriended is either an enemy agent or a pawn ofNisibisi propaganda - telling everyone that he's been told by the Ilsig gods themselves that Vashanka was routed ... I'd like to silence him permanently.' Crit's eyes met Tempus's then, and held.
    'No,' he replied, to all of it, then added: 'Gods don't die; men die. Boys die in multitudes. The thief, Shadowspawn, is no threat to us, just misguided, semi literate, and vain, like all boys. Bring me a conduit to Jubal, or the slaver himself. Contact Niko and have him report - if the witch needs a lesson, I myself will undertake to teach it. And keep your watch upon the fish-eyed folk from the ships -I'm not sure yet that they're as harmless as they seem.'
    Having given Crit enough to do to keep his mind off the rumours of the god Vashanka's troubles - and hence, his own - he rose to leave. 'Some results, by week's end, would be welcome.' The officer toasted him cynically as Tempus walked away.
    Outside, his Tros horse whinnied joyfully. He stroked its mist-dappled neck and felt the sweat there. The weather was close, an early heatwave as unwelcome as the late frosts which had frozen the winter crops a week before their harvest and killed the young sets just planted in anticipation of a bounteous fall. He mounted up and headed south by the granaries towards the palace's north wall where a gate nowhere as peopled or public as the Gate of the Gods was set into the wall by the cisterns. He would talk to Prince Kitty-Cat, then tour the Maze on his way home to the barracks.
    But the prince wasn't receiving, and Tempus's mood was ill -just as well; he had been going to confront the young popinjay, as once or twice a month he was sure he must do, without courtesy or appropriate deference. If Kadakithis was holed up in conference with the blond-haired, fish-eyed folk from the ships and had not called upon him to join them, then it was not surprising: since the gods had battled in the sky above the Mageguild, all things had become confused, worse had come to worst, and Tempus's curse had fallen on him once again with its full force.
    Perhaps the god was dead - certainly, Vashanka's voice in his ear was absent. He'd gone out raping once or twice to see if the Lord of Pillage could be roused to take part in His favourite sport. But the god had not rustled around in his head since New Year's day; the resultant fear of harm to those who loved him by the curse that denied him love had made a solitary man withdraw even further into himself; only the Froth Daughter Jihan, hardly human, though woman in form, kept him company now.
    And that, as much as anything, irked the Stepsons. Theirs was a closed fraternity, open only to the paired lovers of the Sacred Band and distinguished single mercenaries culled from a score of nations and diverted, by Tempus's service and Kitty-Cat's gold, from the northern insurrection they'd drifted through Sanctuary en route to join.
    He, too, ached to war, to fight a declared enemy, to lead his cohort north. But there was his word to a Rankan faction to do his best for a petty prince, and there was this thrice-cursed fleet of merchant warriors come to harbour talking
    'peaceful trade' while their vessels rode too low in the water to be filled with grain or cloth or spices - if not