Clouds split; sunrays danced over the wrack-strewn shore and over the bronzestallion and its rider, stripped down to plated loinguard, making a rainbowabout them. Tempus looked up, landward, to where a lone eunuch clapped pinkpalms together from one of Prince Kadakithis's chariots. The rainbowdisappeared, the clouds suppressed the sun, and in a wrap of shadow theenigmatic Hell Hound (whom the eunuch knew from his own experience to be capableof regenerating a severed limb and thus veritably eternal; and who wasindubitably deadlier than all the mercenaries descended on Sanctuary like fliesupon a day-old carcass) trotted the horse up the beach to where the eunuch inthe chariot was waiting on solid ground.

'What are you doing here, Sissy? Where is your lord, Kada-kithis?' Tempusstopped his horse well back from the irascible pair of blacks in their traces.This eunuch was near their colour: a Wriggly. Cut young and deftly, his answercame in a sweet alto: 'Lord Marshal, most daunting of Hell Hounds, Ibring you His Majesty's apologies, and true word, if you will heed it.'

The eunuch, no more than seventeen, gazed at him longingly. Kadakithis hadaccepted this fancy toy from Jubal, the slaver, despite the slavemaster's ownbrand on its high rump, and the deeper dangers implied by the identity of itsfashioner. Tempus had marked it, when first he heard its lilting voice in thepalace, for he had heard that voice before. Foolish, haughty, or merely pressedbeyond a bedwarmer's ability to cope: no matter; this creature ofJubal's, he hadlong wanted. Jubal and Tempus had been making private war, the more fierce forbeing undeclared, since Tempus had first come to Sanctuary and seen theswaggering, masked killers Jubal kept on staff terrorizing whom they chose onthe town's west side. Tempus had made those masked murderers his private gamestock, the west end of Sanctuary his personal preserve, and the campaign was on.Time and again, he had dispatched them. But tactics change, and Jubal's hadbecome too treacherous for Tempus to endure, especially now with the northerninsurrection half out of its egg of rumour. He said to the parted lips awaitinghis permission to speak and to the deer-soft eyes doting on his every move thatthe eunuch might dismount the car, prostrate itself before him, and from theredeliver its message.

It did all of those, quivering with delight like a dog enraptured by thesmallest attention, and said with its forehead to the sand: 'My lord, the Princebids me say he has been detained by Certain Persons, and will be late, butmeans to attend you. If you were to ask me why that was, then I would have nochoice but to admit to you that the three most mighty magicians, those whosenames cannot be spoken, came down upon the summer palace in billows ofblackest smoke and foul odours, and that the fountains ran red and thesculptures wept and cried, and frogs jumped upon my lord in his bath, allbecause the Hazards are afraid that you might move to free the slayer-ofsorcerers called Cime before she comes to trial. Although my master assured themthat you would not, that you had said nothing to him about this woman, when Ileft they still were not satisfied, but were shaking walls and raising shadesand doing all manner ofwizardly things to demonstrate their concern.'

The eunuch fell quiet, awaiting leave to rise. For an instant there was totalsilence, then the sound of Tempus's slithering dismount. Then he said: 'Let ussee your brand, pretty one,' and with a wiggling of its upthrust rump the eunuchhastened to obey,

It took Tempus longer than he had estimated to wrest a confession from theWriggly, from the Ilsig who was the last of his line and at the end of his line.It did not make cries of pleasure or betrayal or agony, but accepted its destinyas good Wrigglies always did, writhing soundlessly. - '

When he let it go, though the blood was running down its legs and it saw theintestine like wet parchment caught in his fingernails, it wept with relief,promising to deliver his exhortation posthaste to Kadakithis. It kissed hishand, pressing his palm against its beardless cheek, never realizing that itwas, itself, his message, or that it would be dead before the sun set.

2

Kneeling to wash his arm in the surf, he found himself singing a best-forgottenfunerary dirge in the ancient argot all mercenaries leam. But his voice wasgravelly and his memories were treacherous thickets full of barbs, and hestopped as soon as he realized that he sang. The eunuch would die because heremembered its voice from the workshop of despicable Kurd, the frail and filthyvivisectionist, while he had been an experimental animal therein. He rememberedother things, too: he remembered the sear of the branding iron and the smell offlesh burning and the voices of two fellow guardsmen, the Hell Hounds Zaibar andRazkuli, piercing the drug-mist through holes the pain poked in his stupor. Andhe recalled a protracted and hurtful healing, shut away from any who might beoverawed to see a man regrow a limb. Mending, he had brooded, seeking certainty,some redress fit to his grievance. But he had not been sure enough to act. Now,after hearing the eunuch's tale, he was certain. When Tempus was certain.Destiny got out its ledger.

But what to write therein? His instinct told him it was Black Jubal he wanted,not the two Hell Hounds; that Razkuli was a nonentity and Zaibar, like a rawhorse, was merely in need of schooling. Those two had single-handedly arrangedfor Tempus's snuff to be drugged, for him to be branded, his tongue cut out,then sold off to wicked little Kurd, there to languish interminably under theknife? He could not credit it. Yet the eunuch had said - and in such straits noone lies - that though Jubal had gone to Zaibar for help in dealing with Tempus,the slave trader had known nothing of what fate the Hell Hounds had in mind fortheir colleague. Never mind it; Jubal's crimes were voluminous. Tempus wouldtake him for espionage - that punishment could only be administered once. Thenpersonal grudges must be put aside: it is unseemly to hold feuds with the dead.

But if not Jubal, then who had written Tempus's itinerary for Hell? It sounded,suspiciously, like the god's work. Since he had turned his back upon the god,things had gone from bad to worse.

And if Vashanka had not turned His face away from Tempus even while he layhelpless, the god had not stirred to rescue him (though any limb lopped off himstill grew back, any wound he took healed relatively quickly, as men judge suchthings). No, Vashanka, his tutelary, had not hastened to aid him. The speed ofTempus's healing was always in direct proportion to the pleasure the god wastaking in His servant. Vashanka's terrible rebuke had made the man wax terrible,also. Curses and unholy insults rang down from the mind of the god and up fromthe mind of the man who then had no tongue left with which to scream. It hadtaken Hanse the thief, young Shadowspawn, chancemet and hardly known, toextricate him from interminable torture. Now he owed more debt than he liked toShadowspawn, and Shadowspawn knew more about Tempus than even that backstreetercould want to know, so that the thief's eyes slid away, sick and mistrustful,when Tempus would chance upon him in the Maze.

But even then, Tempus's break with divinity was not complete. Hopefully, hestood as Vashanka in the recreation of the Ten-Slaying and Seduction of Azyuna,thinking to propitiate the god while saving face - to no avail. Soon after,hearing that his sister, Cime, had been apprehended slaying sorcerers wantonlyin their beds, he had thrown the amulet of Vashanka, which he had worn sinceformer times, out to sea from this very shore - he had had no choice. Only somuch can be borne from men, so much from gods. Zaibar, had he the wit, wouldhave revelled in Tempus's barely hidden reaction to his news that the fearsomemage-killer was now in custody, her diamond rods locked away in the Hall ofJudgement awaiting her disposition.