The Prince stepped between all of them with the sword. "I think you should have this, Tempus. It's too plain for me-but you won't mind that, will you?"

The Hell-Hound examined the blade and set it aside without comment. "I see you can control your man," he said to Walegrin.

"As you cannot." Walegrin tossed the Hound the boss Dubro had found. "Your men left it behind when they stole my sister last night." They were of a height, Walegrin and Temp us, but it cost Walegrin to look into Tempus' eyes and for once he understood what it meant to be cursed, as Tempus was.

"Yes, the S'danzo. My men disliked the fortune she told for them. They bribed some Downwind to frighten her. They don't understand the Downwind yet. They hadn't intended her to be kidnapped, any more than they'd intended to get robbed themselves. I've dealt with my men-and the Downwinders they hired. Your sister is already back in the bazaar, Walegrin, a bit richer for her adventures and off-limits to all Stepsons. No one guessed you were her brother-certain men are assumed not to have family, you know." Tempus leaned forward then, and spoke only to Walegrin. "Tell me, is your sister worth believing?"

"I believe her."

"Even when she rattles nonsense about invasions from the sea?"

"I believe her enough that I'm remaining in Sanctuary-against all my better judgement."

Tempus turned away to take up Walegrin's sword. He adjusted the belt for his hips and put it on. The Stepsons had already departed. "You won't regrethelping the Prince," he said without looking at anyone. "He's favored of the gods, you know. You'll do well together." He followed his men out the door leaving the Prince alone with Walegrin and Thrusher.

"You might have told me you were going to give him my sword!" Walegrin complained.

"I wasn't. I only meant to distract him-I didn't think he'd take it. I'm sorry. What was the favor you wanted?"

With Illyra and Thrusher safe, and his future mapped out, Walegrin didn't need a favor, but he heard his stomach rumbling and knew Thrush was hungry too. "We'll have a meal fit for a king-or Prince."

"Well, at least that's something I can provide you."

WIZARD WEATHER by Janet Morris

1

In the archmage's sumptuous purple bedroom, the woman astride him took two pins from her silver-shot hair. It was dark-his choice; and damp with cloying shadows-his romanticism. A conjured moon in a spellbound sky was being swallowed by effigy-clouds where the vaulted roof indubitably yet arced, even as he shuddered under the tutored and inexorable attentions of the girl Lastel had brought to his party. She had refused to tell him her name because he would not give his, but had told him what she would do for him so eloquently with her eyes and her body that he had spent the entire evening figuring out a way the two of them might slip up here unnoticed. Not that he feared her escort's jealousy though the drug dealer might conceivably entertain such a sentiment, Lastel no longer had the courage (or the contractual protective wardings) to dare a reprisal against a Hazard-class mage.

Of all the enchanters in wizard-ridden Sanctuary, only three were archmages, nameless adepts beyond summoning or responsibility, and this Hazard was one. In fact, he was the very strongest of those three. When he had been young, he had had a name, but he will forget it, and everything else, quite promptly: the domed and spired estuary of venality which is Sanctuary, nadir of the empire called Ranke; the unmitigated evil he had fielded for decades from his swamp encircled Mageguild fortress; the compromises he had made to hold sway over curmudgeon, courtesan and criminal (so audacious that even the bounds of magics and planeworlds had been eroded by his efforts, and his fellow adepts felled on occasion by demons roused from forbidden defiles to do his bidding here at the end of creation where no balance remains between logic and faith, law and nature, or heaven and hell); the disingenuous methods through which his will was worked, plan by tortuous plan, upon a town so hateful and immoral that both the flaunted gods and magicians' devils agreed that its inhabitants deserved no less dastardly a fate-all of this, and more, will fade from him in the time it takes a star to burn out, falling from the sky.

Now, the First Hazard glimpses her movement, though he is close to ejaculation, sputtering with sensations that for years he has assumed he had outgrown, or forgotten how to feel. Senility creeps upon the finest flesh when a body is maintained for millenia, and into the deepest mind, through thousands of years. He does not look his age, or tend to think of it. The years are his, mandated. Only a very special kind of enemy could defeat him, and those were few and far between. Simple death, morbidity or the spells of his brothers were like gnats he kept away by the perfume of his sweat: merely the proper diet, herbs and spells and consummated will, had long ago vanquished them as far as he was concerned.

So strange to lust, to desire a particular woman; he was amused, joyous; he had not felt so good in years. A tiny thrill of caution had hor-ripilated his nape early on, when he noticed the silvering of her nightblack hair, but this girl was not old enough to be-'Ahhhh!" Her premeditated rippling takes him over passion's edge, and he is falling, place and provenance forgotten, not a terrible adept wrenching the world about to suit his whim and comfort, but just a man.

In that instant, eyes defocused, he sees but does not note the diamond sparkle of the rods poised above him; his ears are filled with his own breathing; the song of entrapment she sings softly has him before he thinks to think, or thinks to fear, or thinks to move.

By then, the rods, their sharp fine points touching his arched throat, owned him. He could not move; not his body nor his soul responded; his mind could not control his tongue. Thinking bitterly of the indignity of being frozen like a rearing stallion, he hoped his flesh would slump once life had fled. As he felt the points enter into his skin and begin to suck at the thread binding him to life, his mortification marshaled his talents: he cleared his vision, forced his eyes to obey his mind's command. Though he was a great sorcerer, he was not omnipotent: he could not manage to make his lips frame a curse to cast upon her, just watched the free agent Cime- who had slipped, disguised, into so many mages' beds of late-sip the life from him relish-ingly. So slow she was about it he had time to be thankful she did not take him through his eyes. The song she sings has cost her much to learn, and the death she staves off will not be so kind as his. Could he have spoken, then, resigned to it, he would have thanked her: it is no shame to be brought down by an opponent so worthy. They paid their prices to the same host. He set about composing his exit, seeking his meadow, star-shaped and ever green, where he did his work when meditation whisked him into finer awarenesses than flesh could ever share. If he could seat himself there, in his established place of power, then his death was nothing, his flesh a fingernail, overlong and ready to be pared.

He did manage that. Cime saw to it that he had the time. It does not do to anger certain kinds of powers, the sort which, having dispensed with names, dispense with discorporation. Some awful day, she would face this one, and others whom she had guided out of life, in an afterlife which she had helped populate. Shades tended to be unforgiving.