Wings of Omen

What Women Do Best

Chris and Janet Morris

From a hunting blind of artfully piled garbage guarded by a dozen fat, half-tamed rats, an Ilsig head, then another, and another, caught the moonlight as the death squad emerged from the tunnels to go stalking Beysibs in the Maze.

They called their leader Zip, when they called him anything at all. He didn’t encourage familiarity; he’d always been a loner, a creature of the streets without family or friends. Even before the Beysib had come and the waves of executions had begun, the street urchins and the Maze dwellers had stayed clear of the knife-boy who was half Ilsig and half some race much paler, who hired out for copper to any enforcer in the Maze or disgruntled dealer in Downwind. And who, it was said, brought an eye or tongue or liver from every soul he murdered to Vashanka’s half forgotten altar on the White Foal River’s edge.

Even his death squad was afraid of him, Zip knew. And that was fine with him: every now and again, a member was captured by the Rankan oppressors or the—Beysib oppressors: the less these idealists of revolution knew of him, the less they could reveal under torture or blandishment. He’d had a friend once, or at least a close acquaintance—an Ilsig thief called Hanse. But Hanse, with all his shining blades and his high-toned airs, had gone the way of everything in Sanctuary since the Beysibs’ ships had docked: to oblivion, to hell in a basket.

Standing up straight for a moment in the moon-licked gloom to get his bearings, Zip heard laughter rounding a corner, saw a flash of pantaloon, and ducked back with a hiss and a signal to his group, who’d been trained by Nisibisi insurgents and knew this game as well as he.

The moonlight wasn’t bright enough to tell the color of the Beysib males—Zip didn’t think of them as men—pantaloons, but he’d be willing to bet they were of claret velvet or shiny purple silk. Killing Beysibs was about as exciting as killing ants, and as fruitless: there were just too damned many of them.

The three coming toward his hunting party were drunk as Rankans and limp as any man might be who’d just come out of the Street of Red Lanterns empty of seed and purse.

He could almost see their fish-eyes bulging; he could hear their jewelry clank. For pussy-whipped sons of snake women, these were loud and brash, taller than average, and with a better command of street-Rankene: from under their glittering, veil-draped hats, profanity worthy of the Rankan Hell Hounds cut the night.

There remained nearly the whole Street of Red Lanterns between the two parties. Pre-position, Zip breathed, and his two young squad members slipped away to find their places.

They’d done this every night since Harvest Moon; the only result of it Zip had seen was a second, then a third wave of Beysib ritual executions. But since those ceremonially slaughtered were hated Rankan overlords and Ilsigis who served the Rankans and the Bey, it wasn’t keeping any of the revolutionaries up at night.

And you had to do something. Kadakithis had been a harsh ruler, but the Rankan barbarians were spoken of wistfully and with something bordering on affection now that the Beysib had come: a matriarchy complete with female mercenaries, assassins, magicians more utterly ruthless than men could ever be. It was enough to have brought Zip into the orb of the revolution—his manhood was something he’d fight to keep. It was going to take more than a few exposed fish-folk titties to make him bow his head or renege on his heritage.

Right now, he was going to kill a couple of Beysib boytoys and lay their pertinent equipment on Vashanka’s Foal-side altar: maybe the Rankan murder-god could be roused to action. Death knew that the Ilsig gods were out of their depth with these women—despots whose spittle was as venomous as the pet snakes they kept and the spells they spoke. The revolution could use the publicity and Zip could use the money their jewelry was going to bring once Marc melted it down.

Down the street came the Beysib boy-whores, laughing in deeper voices than Beysib men usually dared. Zip could make out some words now: —porking town down on its porking hands and knees with its butt in the air while those porkers pork it—

Another voice cut in: I’ve told you once, Gayle, to watch your mouth. Now I’m making it an order. Beysibs don’t—God’s balls!

Without warning, and according to plan, Zip’s two cohorts jumped out from concealment as the three Beysibs passed them.

Zip readied his throwing knives: once the Beysibs were herded his way, they were as good as dead. He widened his stance, feeling his pulse begin to pound.

But these Beysibs didn’t run: from under their cloaks or out of their pantaloons, weapons suddenly appeared: Zip could hear the grate of metal as swords left their scabbards and the dismayed shouts from his cohorts as they tried to engage swordsmen with rusty daggers and sharpened wooden sticks.

Zip had a wrist slingshot; it was his emergency weapon. He didn’t mean to use it; he was still thinking to himself that he was better off not getting involved, that these weren’t your average Beysibs—maybe not Beysibs at all—and that he didn’t owe the death-squad members anything, when he found himself letting fly once, then again, with his wrist slingshot and making as much noise as he could while running pell-mell toward the fray.

One of his missiles found its target: with a yelp, a pantalooned figure went to its knees. Another turned his head, cursing like a soldier, and something whizzed past Zip’s ear. He felt warmth, wetness, and knew he’d been grazed.

Then he realized that neither of his squad members were standing: he slowed to a walk, his breathing heavy, trying to see if the two lying in the dirt were moving. He thought one was; the other seemed too still.

His adversaries, whoever they were, seemed to want to continue the argument: the two with the swords moved toward him, parallel to one another, splitting the street into defensible halves, far enough away from the buildings to avoid any more lurkers in doorways, and from each other to give each room to handle anything that might come his way. Neither spoke; they closed on him with businesslike economy and a certain eagerness that gave Zip just enough time for second thoughts.

These were professional tactics, put into practice by professionals. When times had been easier in Sanctuary and an old warhorse named Tempus had formed a special forces unit of Stepsons and then invited any Ilsigis who dared to train for a citizens’ militia, Zip had taken the opportunity to learn all he could about the Rankan enemy: Zip had been taught street control by the same book as those now advancing down this particular street toward him.

Two to one against professionals, there was no chance that he could win.

He raised his hands as if in surrender.

The two soldiers-in-disguise growled low to each other in what might have been Court Rankene.

Before they could decide the obvious—to take him alive and spend the evening asking him questions it would be painful, perhaps crippling, not to answer—Zip did what he had to do: let fly with a palmed dagger and then a specially pronged slingshot missile.

Both casts sped murderously true—not into the probably armored chests of the two big men with swords (whose companion was now on his feet and falling in behind them, perfectly and by-the-drill covering every move they made) but into the exposed neck and chest of Zip’s own two men: no revolutionary could be captured alive; everyone knew too much; they’d all signed suicide pacts in blood but, in this case, Zip knew he’d better help these two along. Rankan interrogation could be very nasty.

Then as the rear man yelled, Get the bastard, and the two in front lunged toward him, Zip wheeled and dove for the tunnel entrance, down among the garbage and the rats, pulled the cobble-faced cover in place behind him, and shot the stout interior bolt.

Two days later, Hakiem was sitting on a bench in Promise Park—not one of his accustomed haunts.

He considered himself, as a storyteller, a neutral party in this war between Ranke and the Harka Bey for control of Sanctuary. In his innermost heart he couldn’t help but take sides, though, and since his side was the side of the Ilsigi, whose land this once was and whose sorrow he now shared, he’d gotten just a little bit involved with helping the revolution.

This was nothing new for Hakiem: he’d been a little involved with Jubal the ex-slaver, a little involved with Prince Governor Kadakithis’s Hell Hounds … with everything, if truth be known, that concerned his beloved, benighted town.

He kept telling himself that there was a good story in whatever it was he shouldn’t be getting involved in. The revolution, which might be the greatest story Sanctuary would ever offer him, was also the most dangerous. Involved in it were Rankans and Ilsigis, fighting together though some didn’t know it and others wouldn’t admit it against the heinous matriarchy of the Beysibs.

But, Hakiem reminded himself as he waited for his contact to appear, he was an old man: he wouldn’t have lived to be old if he were too foolish. And Hakiem, who’d been safe on the sidelines, an observer and a certified neutral all his life, was beginning to feel the tug of revolutionary fervor himself—politics, he well knew, was an old man’s game: old men sent young men out to lose their lives for principles. He’d have to be careful not to become as deluded as those the Ilsigi populace fought: the Beysibs, the Rankans, the Nisibisi and whoever else wanted to put their stamp on his poor little sand spit of a town,

Whoever had sent him the note which had bade him come here (Hakiem, for the tale most worth telling this season, meet me at the bench under the parasol pine in Promise Park at midday, two days hence.) was willing to take outrageous chances: even in daylight, the Beysib discouraged public gatherings. Two, these days, was a public gathering.

Still, this was the first time the rebels had tried to contact him, although it seemed to Hakiem that they should have realized they needed him sooner: without rumor, without the proper stirring stories of heroism and success, without a vision of the revolution to come, no insurgency could succeed.

Two blond, bare-breasted Bey women went by, their bulging eyes downcast, demurely veiled, Beysib males prancing behind them, and behind those, Ilsig boys carrying sunshades.

When they’d gone, Hakiem took a deep breath. He didn’t have any assurances that it was the revolutionaries who’d sent him the note: he’d made an assumption, one that might not be true. Either of the fish-women with their trained serpents who now receded into the distance, their entourage behind, could have sent that note.

Hakiem rubbed his face, bleary-eyed and weary: this final indignity heaped upon luckless Sanctuary was almost too much for him to bear. Daily, the rubble piles grew greater and the body count mounted. Orphans now outnumbered parented children, and child gangs as deadly as the Nisibisi-sponsored death squads roamed the town at night when (everywhere but in the Maze, which was impossible to police) the Beysib curfew was in force.

Once, the town of Sanctuary had been sneered at as the anus of Empire—but at least then it had been part of something comprehensible: the Rankan Empire, venal and vicious, was a creation of men and manpower, not of women and sorcery. The Harka Bey and their sorceresses imposed a rule of supernatural terror upon Sanctuary that all priests—Ilsigi and Rankan alike—agreed would soon bring down the wrath of the elder gods.

An Ilsigi priest, in his fiery sermons (held surreptitiously north of town in the Old Ruins), had warned that the gods might send Sanctuary to the bottom of the sea if the populace did not unite and oust the Bey.

Some had hoped Kadakithis might show his face there last night; but no one in the city had seen the poor Prince Governor up close since the takeover: sometimes a personage who looked very like Kadakithis appeared at the high window in the Hall of Justice, but the whispers were that this was only a simulacrum of Kadakithis, that the Prince Governor languished, all but dead, under the Beysa Shupansea’s spell. And the rumors were not so far from the truth, though Kadakithis was held in thrall by love, not magic.

Things were so much worse now than they’d been when the Nisibisi witches had come down from the north preaching Ilsig liberation and prophesying a great upheaval to come that, had the most terrible Nisibisi witch—Roxane, Death’s Queen, appeared now before Hakiem and demanded his soul in payment for the opportunity to tell a tale of Sanctuary’s freedom, Hakiem would gladly have given it.

Things were so damned depressing, sometimes he wanted to cry.

When he wiped his eyes and took his old, gnarled hands away, a woman stood there before him.

He drew in a shocked breath and almost cowered: was it a witch? Was it dreaded Roxane, come back from the northern war? Roxane, who had all but destroyed the Stepsons and made undead slaves of her conquests? Had he just pacted with a witch? By the mechanism of a thought, just an errant thought? Surely, no one could lose their soul so easily, so offhandedly.…

The woman was tall and broad-shouldered with a firm chin and clear narrow eyes; her hair was as black as a wizard’s, her clothes nondescript but cut to facilitate easy movement—her tunic vented, her Ilsig leggings bloused at the knees and disappearing into calf-high, laced boots.

Hakiem, are you? I’m Kama. Shall we walk?

Walk? I’m … waiting for someone—my apprentice, he lied lamely. Was this a Bey mercenary? He didn’t know they covered their breasts or wore pants. Was he to be arrested? That would be a story—Inside a Beysib Interrogation Cell—if only he might live to tell it.…

Walk. The woman’s voice was throaty as she chuckled. It’s safer, for this kind of meet. And the someone you’re waiting for, I hope, is me. She smiled, and there was something familiar about her eyes, as if an old acquaintance looked out of them. She extended her hand to him as if he were infirm, some old woman to be helped to her feet. Women were getting altogether out of hand in Sanctuary this season.

He brushed her hand aside and got up stiffly, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

She was saying, —your apprentice? That idea’s not half-bad. I’d probably qualify, having won first prize at the last Festival of Man, wouldn’t you think?

First prize? Festival of Man? Hakiem repeated dumbly. What did you say your name was? The Festival of Man was held once every four years, far to the north. It was a festival for kings and armies, a matter of war games and athletic events, and there was a poetry contest for historians of the field and tellers of heroic tales that every storyteller alive dreamed of winning. But even to attend you had to be sponsored by a king, a grateful army, a powerful lord. Who was this woman? She’d told him, but he was so melancholy and so depressed—no, let’s face it, fool: you’re getting old!—he couldn’t recall what she’d said.

Can I trust you, old man? Or am I safe because, though I told you once, you’ve already forgot? Her mouth twisted in a defensive little grin that definitely reminded him of someone else. But who?

Hakiem said carefully, You can trust me if your heart is in the right place, Candy. That was what she’d said, he thought—or close enough to make her correct him.

She looked at her booted feet as they scuffed up autumn dirt and when she raised her head she looked right at him: "I’m Kama, of the Rankan 3rd Commando. If your heart’s in the right place, you’ll put me in touch with the rebels. Otherwise, she shrugged, you folks are going to have a lot of dead amateurs and a stillborn revolution."

What? What are you talking about? Rebels? I know no rebels—

Wonderful, I like your spirit, old man. You’re the ears of this town, and some say the mouth. Tell whomever you don’t know that I’ll be at Marc’s Junky Weapons Shop an hour before curfew and thereafter, tonight, to make sure we don’t have another little problem like we had on the Street of Red Lanterns two nights ago. If we’re going to kick some Beysib pantaloons, we’ll need every man we’ve got.

Hakiem had the distinct feeling that this Kama of the Rankan 3rd Commando had forgotten that she, herself, was a woman. I can’t promise anything, he said politically, after all, I’ve only your word and—

"Just do it, old man; save the talk for those who’ll listen. And show up tonight, if you dare, to hear some tales you’ll die from telling. Even if you don’t, I’ll be telling everyone I meet I’m your apprentice—do try to remember my name."

She increased her pace, leaving him behind as if he were standing still.

Watching her draw away, Hakiem stopped trying to catch up. There were too many Bey around. If he wanted a story worth dying for, he could drop by Marc’s.

He wasn’t sure if he would, or sure that not going would save him from involvement by implication. But then, she—Kama—knew that. He’d been too daunted by her talk of the Festival of Man and her whole bearing to consider much of what she’d said.

Now, walking unseeingly Mazeward, toward the Vulgar Unicorn for the first of many drinks, he did: the Rankan 3rd Commando were rangers with a very bad reputation since the real Stepsons had left town, filling their ranks with locals, to fight the Wizard Wars in the north, there had been no force on the side of Empire worth rallying round. If the 3rd Commando was here, then the Empire hadn’t given up on Sanctuary, all was not lost, and resistance was really possible.

Of course, given the stories about the 3rd’s brutality and their provenance—they’d been formed by Tempus long ago to quash just such a revolt as might be brewing in Sanctuary—the cure for Sanctuary’s Beysib ills might well be worse than the disease.

Straton wasn’t at all sure this was going to work. He hadn’t seen Ischade, the vampire woman who lived down by the White Foal, since before the war for Wizardwall, when he’d been an on-duty Stepson, with the whole cadre behind him and Critias beside him, and the only troubles in Sanctuary were sorcery and refractory death squads, and the occasional assassination: all standard stuff.

Strat wished Crit was here, then slid off his horse before Ischade’s oddly shadowed house and, crossbow at the ready, tethered his big bay horse outside. Crit would be along, one of these days. The whole unit was drifting in, a man here, a pair there; along with Sync’s 3rd Commando, they had a good chance of putting things to rights—if they could just figure out what rights were. Sync thought they should put every Beysib in town on one big funerary pyre and give ’em to the gods, for starters.

Straton wasn’t taking orders from Sync: with Crit still upcountry and Niko in transit with Tempus, Straton was in charge of the Stepsons, who wanted only to kill every idiot who’d made the unit designation Stepson a slur and a curse here while they’d been gone.

But Kama had prevailed on Strat to try enlisting the vampire woman’s aid. Kama was Tempus’s daughter; Strat still respected her for that—not for anything she’d done or earned, just for being his commander’s progeny.

So he’d come back here, despite the fact that Ischade the vampire woman was more dangerous than a bedroom full of Harka Bey, to invite Ischade to the little party Sync and he were throwing at Marc’s.

He’d probably have come anyway, he told himself: Ischade was dangerous enough to be interesting, the sort of woman you never forget once you look into her eyes. And he’d looked into them: deep, hellhole eyes that made him wonder what kind of death she offered her victims …

Nothing for it but to knock on the damn door and get it over with, then.

He pulled on his leather tunic and assayed the walk up to her threshold; as he did, the interior lights flickered and dimmed weirdly. The last time he’d been here, his eyesight had been bothering him. It wasn’t, anymore, thanks to a benign spell cast during his northern sortie.

So he’d really see her, this time.

On her doorstep, he hesitated; then he muttered a prayer that consigned his soul to the appropriate god should he die here, and knocked.

He heard movement within, then nothing.

He knocked again.

This time, the movement came closer and the lights in her front windows winked out.

Ischade, he called out gruffly, a dagger in hand to pick the lock or slice its thong or pound upon the wooden door with all his might, open up. It’s—

The door seemed to disappear before him; off balance, for he’d been about to thump on it hard with his dagger’s hilt, he took a stumbling step forward.

I know, said a velvet voice coming from a wraithlike face cowled in inky shadows, who you are. I remember you. Have you tired of giving death? Or have you brought me another gift? Her eyes lifted up to his, her hood fell back, and yet, somehow, backlit in her doorway, her face was still in shadow.

Her eyes, however, were not.

Straton found himself forgetful of his purpose. He wasn’t a womanizer; he wasn’t an impressionable boy; yet Ischade’s gaze was like some drug which made the world recede and all he wanted to do was look at her, touch her, brave the danger of her, and do to her what he was nearly certain none of the sheep she’d fed upon had ever managed to do.

He said, Invite me in.

She said, I have a visitor within.

He replied, Get rid of him.

She smiled: My thought exactly. You will wait here?

He agreed: Don’t be long.

When her door closed, it was as if a bond had broken, a leash been snapped, a drug worn off.

He found that he was shivering, and it wasn’t anywhere near as cold in autumnal Sanctuary as it had been on Wizardwall; despite his shaking hands, there was sweat beading on his upper lip. He wiped it and regretted shaving for this court enterprise.

Either he was lucky, and she’d be sated by whatever meat she had in there, so that he could talk to her, convince her, make some sort of deal with her, or he was walking into serious trouble, without Crit or any of his team to get him out if he got in too deep.

About the time he was deciding that no one would ever think the worse of him if he just walked away from this one, left Ischade’s stone unturned, and said she hadn’t been at home, the door reopened and a delicate, white hand reached out to him:

Come in, Straton, said the vampire woman. It’s been a long time since one such as you has come to me.

Sync had saved the fabled crimelord Jubal for himself. The Sanctuary veterans he had on staff had warned him about the vicious squalor of Downwind, but he hadn’t believed them.

Now he believed, but he believed more in his good right arm and the attractiveness of the offer he had to make.

This Jubal was black and stout as a gnarled tree, older than Sync had been led to believe by half, and sporting a fey blue hawk-mask that would have bothered Sync more if the sycophants around the ex-slaver weren’t verifying Jubal’s identity by every deferential move they made.

The head bootlicker here was named Saliman; the hovel was reasonably commodious once you got inside, but the band of pseudo-beggars ranged around it would give Sync a strenuous afternoon if he had to cut his way through them to get out. He’d unbridled his horse as a precaution: if he whistled, Sync was going to have twelve hundred Rankan pounds of iron hooves and snapping jaws to back him up. 3rd Commando training told him he didn’t need more than that: one man, one horse, one holocaust on demand.

Sync wasn’t a politician; he was a field commander. But he wasn’t in this Downwind potty to fight; he was here to talk.

Jubal, in a flurry of feathered robes, sat down on something very like a throne and said—in a muffled voice through his mask: Talk, mercenary.

Sync replied: Get rid of the mask and your playmates, and we’ll talk. This is between us, or not at all.

Jubal responded, Then perhaps it’s not at all. But then you’ve wasted our time, and we don’t like that. Do we?

Ten scruffy locals made threatening noises.

Look here, slumlord, are you in the pay of the Beysibs? If not, let’s get serious. I didn’t come here to give your staff combat lessons. If they need ’em, I’ve got trainers in the 3rd Commando who specialize in making silk purses out of sow’s ears.

Three of the ten were edging forward. Jubal stopped them with a raised hand. From under the mask came what might have been a rattling sigh. 3rd Commando? Should I be impressed?

Sync said, I don’t know what you’re supposed to be, Jubal, in that damn feathered cape and mask. Is everybody in this town in drag? He crossed his arms, thinking he should have sent a Sanctuary veteran to bring this black man in by the ear. He had to remind himself forcefully not to call Jubal a Wrigglie to his face. It was a damned shame, having to join forces with an enemy you’d thoroughly beaten years ago—and on equal terms. The misfortunes of war were never-ending.

Not everybody, Jubal said, leaning forward.

The naked threat in his voice told Sync that he’d pushed just about as far as he could with this ex-gladiator cum slaver cum power player, so he changed tack: That’s comforting. Now, since you won’t get rid of your bodyguards, even though it looks to me like you’d be safe enough defending yourself, I’m going to tell you why I’m here and we can have a democratic referendum on how much of a share in the profits your men here get, how much you keep, what everybody’s got to do, and who else is—

All right, Jubal interrupted. All right. Saliman, clear the room and make sure no one gets too curious.

But my lord— Saliman sputtered.

"Do it!"

Almost as if by magic, the muscle men disappeared.

Now, what’s on your mind, Sync?

"You