Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  “You see?” he said, showing teeth. “I have no desire for your blood, understand me? Only this bauble.”

  The bracelet remained cold in his palm and when it moved he jerked his hand instinctively. Fast as he was he was only human, not a striking serpent; the bracelet, suddenly become a living snake, drove its fangs into the meaty part of his hand that was the inner part of his thumb. It clung, and it hurt. Oh it hurt.

  The thief’s smile vanished with his outcry of pain. Yet he saw her smile, and even as he felt the horror within him he raised the throwing knife to stab the filthy bitch who had trapped him.

  That is, he tried to raise the knife, tried to shake his bitten hand to which the serpent clung. He failed. Almost instantly, the bite of that unnatural snake ossified every bone and bit of cartilage in his body and, stiffly, Gath the thief fell down dead.

  His victim, still smiling, squatted to retrieve her property. She was shivering in excitement. She slipped the cold hard bracelet of gold onto her wrist. Its eyes, cold hard stones, scintillated. And a tremor ran all through the woman. Her eyes glittered and sparkled.

  “Oooohh,” she murmured with a shiver, all trembly and tingly with excitement and delight. “It was worth every piece of silver I paid, this lovely bauble from that lovely shop. I’m really glad it was destroyed. Those of us who bought these weapons of the god are so unique.” She was trembling, excitement high in her and her heart racing with the thrill of danger faced and killing accomplished, and she stroked the bracelet as if it were a lover.

  She went home with her head high in pride and continuing excitement, and she was not at all happy when her husband railed at her for being so late and seized her by the left wrist. He went all bright eyed and stiff and fell down dead. She was not at all happy. She had intended to kill only strangers for the thrill of it, those who deserved it. Somewhere, surely, the god Vashanka smiled.

  ****

  “THE GOD-DAMNED city’s in a mess and busy as a kicked anthill and I think you had more than a whit to do with it,” the dark young man said. (Or was he a youth? Street-wise and tough and hooded of eyes and wearing knives as a courtesan wore gems. Hair blacker than black and eyes nearly so above a nose almost meant for a bird of prey.)

  “ ‘God-damned’ city, indeed,” said the paler, discomfitingly tall man, who was older but not old, and he came close to smiling. “You don’t know how near you are to truth, Shadowspawn.”

  Around them in the charcoal dimness others neither heard nor were overheard. In this place, the trick was not to be overheard. The trick was to talk under everyone else. A bad tavern with a bad reputation in a bad area of a nothing town, the tavern called the Vulgar Unicorn was an astonishingly quiet place.

  “Just call me Hanse and stop being all cryptic and fatherly,” the dark young man said. “I’m not looking for a father. I had one—I’m told. Then I had Cudget Swearoath. Cudget told me all I—all he knew.”

  The other man heard; “fatherly” used to mean “patronizing”, and the flash of ego in the tough called Shadowspawn. Chips on his shoulders out to here. The other man did not smile. How to tell Hanse how many Hanses he had known, over so many years?

  “Listen. One night a while ago I killed. Two men.” Hanse did not lower his voice for that statement-not-admission; he kept it low. The shadow of a voice.

  “Not men, Hanse. Hawk-masks. Jubal’s bravoes. Hardly men.”

  “They were men, Tempus. They were all men. So is Hanse and even Kadaki—the prince-governor.”

  “Kitty-Cat.”

  “I do not call him that,” Hanse said, with austerity. Then he said, “It’s you I’m not sure of, Tempus. Are you a man?”

  “I’m a man,” Tempus said, with a sigh that seemed to come from the weight of decades and decades. “Tonight I asked you to call me Thales. Go ahead, Hanse. You killed two men, while helping me. Were you, by the way? Or were you lurking around my horse that night thinking of laying hands on some krrf?”

  “I use no drugs and little alcohol.”

  “That isn’t what I asked,” Tempus said, not bothering to refute.

  Dark eyes met Tempus’s, which impressed him. “Yes. That is why I was there, Thales. Why ‘Thay-lees’ ?”

  “Since all things are presently full of gods, why not ‘Thales’? Thank you, Hanse. I appreciate your honesty. We can—”

  “Honesty?” A man, once well built and now wearing his chest all over his broad belt and bulging under it as well, had been passing their small round table. “Did I hear something about Hanse’s honesty? Hanse?” His laugh was a combination: pushed and genuine.

  The lean youth called Shadowspawn moved nothing but his head. “How’d you like a hole in your middle to let out all that hot air, Abohorr?”

  “How’d you like a third eye, Abohorr?” Hanse’s tablemate said.

  Abohorr betook himself elsewhere, muttering—and hurrying. Both Hanse’s lean swift hands remained on the tabletop. “You know him, Thales?”

  “No.”

  “You heard me say his name and so you said it right after me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sharp, Thales. Too … smart.” Hanse slapped the table’s surface. “I’ve been meeting too many sharp people lately. Sharp as…”

  “Knives,” Tempus said, finishing the complaint of a very, very sharp young man. “You were mentioning that you were waiting for me to come out of that house—not home, Hanse, because you knew I was carrying. And then Jubal’s bravoes attacked—me—and you took down two.”

  “I was mentioning that, yes.” Hanse developed a seemingly genuine interest in his brown-and-orange Saraprins mug. “How many men have you killed, Thales?”

  “Oh gods. Do not ask.”

  “Many.”

  “Many, yes.”

  “And no scars on you.”

  Tempus looked pained. “No scars on me,” he said, to his own big hands on the table. Bronzed, they were still more fair than Shadowspawn’s. On a sudden thought, he looked up and his expression was of dawning revelation and disbelief. “Hanse? You saved my life that night. I saved yours—but they were after me to begin with. Hanse? How many men have you killed?”

  Hanse looked away. Hair like a raven, nose of a young falcon. Profile carved out by a hand-axe sharper than a barber’s razor, all planes and angles. A pair of onyxes for eyes, and just that hard. His look away was uncharacteristic and Tempus knew it. Tempus worked out of the palace and had access to confidential reports, one of which not even the prince-governor had seen. He wouldn’t, either, because it no longer existed. Too, Tempus had dealt with this spawn of Downwind and the shadows. He was here in this murkily-lit tavern of humanity’s dregs to deal with him again.

  Hanse, looking away, said, “You are not to tell anyone.”

  Tempus knew just what to say. “Do not insult me again.”

  Hanse’s nod was not as long as the thickness of one of his knives. (Were there five, or did he really wear a sixth on one of his thighs? Tempus doubted that; the strap wouldn’t stay up.)

  At last Hanse answered the question. “Two.”

  Two men. Tempus nodded, sighing, pushing back to come as close to slumping on his bench as his kind of soldier could. Damp. Who would have thought it? The reputation he had, this dark surly scary (to others, not the man currently calling himself Tempus) youth from the gutters he doubtless thought he had risen so far above. Tempus knew he had wounded a man or two, and he had assumed. Now Shadowspawn said he had never slain! That, from such a one, was an admission. Because of me he has been blooded, Tempus mused, and the weary thought followed: Well, he’s not the first. I had my first two, once. I wonder who they were, and where? (But he knew, he knew. A man did not forget such. Tempus was older than anyone thought; he was not as world-weary old as he thought, or thought he thought.) Just now he wanted to put forth a hand and touch the much younger man. He certainly did not.

  He said, “How do you feel about it?”

  Hanse continued to gaze assid
uously at something else. How could a child of the desert with such long long lashes and that sensuous, almost pretty mouth look so grim and thin-lipped? “I threw up.”

  “That proves you are human and is what you did. How do you feel about it?”

  Hanse looked at him directly. After a time, he shrugged.

  “Yes,” Tempus sighed, nodding. He drained his cup. Raised a right arm on high and glanced in the general direction of the tap. The new nightman nodded. Though he had not looked at the fellow, Tempus lowered his arm and looked at Hanse. “I understand,” he said.

  “Do you. A while ago I told the prince that it is a prince’s business to kill, not a thief’s. Now I have killed.”

  “What a wonderful thing to say to a bit of royalty! I wish you weren’t so serious right now, so I could laugh aloud. Do not expect any gentle words from me about the kills, my friend. It happens. I didn’t ask for your help—or for you to be waiting for me. You won’t do that again.”

  “Not that way, no.” Hanse leaned back while whatever-his-name-was (they called him “Two-Thumb”) set two newly-filled mugs between them. He did not take the other two, or wait for payment. “I think things started when Bourne … died, and you came to Thieves’ World.”

  “ ‘Thieves’ World’ ?”

  Again that almost-embarrassed shrug. “It’s what we call Sanctuary. Some of us. Now the whole city’s in a mess and a turmoil and I think you have to do with that.”

  “I believe you said that.”

  “You led me astray, ‘Thales’. That temple or store or whatever it was. It … collapsed?—erupted, like a volcano? Something. Next the prince—”

  “You really do respect him, don’t you?”

  “I don’t work for him though,” Hanse pointed out; Tempus did. “He impounded the … the god-weapons?—that place sold, or tried to. Hell Hounds paying people for things they bought—or else! Things! New wealth in the city, because some of them had been stolen and now are bought from thieves. People are laughing at dealing with the new changer: the palace!”

  Changer, Tempus knew, meant fence in this—city? O my God Vashanka—this? A city?!

  “Two ships sitting out there in the harbour,” Hanse went on, “guarded up to here. I know those Things, those dark weapons of sorcery, are being loaded aboard. Then what? Out to sea and straight to the bottom?”

  “The very best place for them,” Tempus said, turning and slowly turning his glazed earthenware mug. This one was striped garishly in yellow waves.” Believe it. There is too much power in those devices.”

  “Meanwhile some ‘enforcers’ from the mageguild have been trying to get hands on them first.”

  That Tempus also knew. Three of the toughs had been eliminated in the past twenty hours, unless another or two had been slain tonight, by local Watchmen or those special guardsmen called Hell Hounds. “Unions will try to protect their members, yes. No matter what. A union is a mindless animal.”

  “You paid me well fair, to fetch you the diamond wand-things that woman wears in her hair. I did, and she has them back. You gave them back.”

  Cime. Cime’s diamond-rods in her fine fine wealth of hair. “Yes. Did I?”

  “You did. And strange things are happening in Sanctuary. Those were sorcerous weapons those hawk-masks used against you and me. A poor thief tried to snatch a woman’s bracelet the other night, down in—never mind the street. She shouldn’t have been there. The bracelet turned into a snake and killed him. I don’t know what it did to him. He’s dead and they say he weighs about twice as much as he did alive.”

  “It solidified his bones. It was obtained this morning. And when didn’t strange things happen in Sanctuary, my friend?”

  “That is twice you have called me that.” Hanse’s words had the sound of accusation about them.

  “So I have. I must mean it, then.”

  Hanse became visibly uncomfortable: “I am Hanse. I was … apprentice to Cudget Swearoath. Prince Kitty-Cat had him hanged. I am Shadowspawn. I have breached the palace and because of me a Hell Hound is dead. I have no friends.”

  “And you slip and call him ‘Kitty-Cat’ when you think of your executed mentor, do you? Not seeking a father, eh? Do you know that all men do, and that I have mine, in Vashanka? Ah Hanse how you seek to be enigmatic and so cool—and are about as transparent as a pan of water caught from the sky!”

  Tempus waved a hand. “Save all that. Just tell me not to be your friend. Not to call you friend.”

  A silence fell over them like a struck banner and something naked stared out of Hanse’s eyes. By the time he knew he must speak into the silence, it was too late. That same silence was Tempus’s answer.

  “Yes,” Tempus said, considerately-cleverly changing the subject. “What old whatsisname Torchholder yammers about is true. Vashanka came, and He claimed Sanctuary. His name is branded into the place, now. The very temple of Ils lies in rubble. Vashanka created the Weaponshop, from nothing, and—”

  “A pedlar-god?”

  “I didn’t think much of the tactic myself,” Tempus said, hoping Vashanka heard him while noting how good the youth was at sneering. “And the Weaponshop destroyed the mage the governor imported to combat him. Vashanka is not to be combated.”

  Hanse snapped glances this way and that. “Say such things a time or two more in Sanctuary, my friend, and your body will be mourning the loss of its head.”

  The blond man stared at him. “Do you believe that?”

  Hanse let that pass, while he rowed into the current of other conversations in the tavern. A current restless as a thief on a landing outside a window, and conversations just as stealthy and dark. He tuned it out again, stepping out of the flow yet flowing with it. Quietly.

  “And how many of those fell Things do you think are still loose?”

  “Too many. Two or four? You know our job is to collect them.”

  “Our?”

  “The Hell Hounds.”

  “Who’s your bearded friend, Hanse?”

  The speaker stood beside the table, only a bit older than Hanse and just as cocky. Older in years only; he had not benefited from those years and would never be so much as Hanse. Self-consciously he wore self-consciously tight black. Oh, a brilliant thief! About as unobtrusive as hives.

  Hanse was staring at Tempus, who was pink and bronze of skin, gold and honey of hair, lengthy and lengthy of legs, and smoothshaven as a pair of doeskin leggings. Hanse did not take his dark-eyed gaze off the Hell Hound, while his dark hand moved out to close on the (black-bracered) wrist of the other young man.

  “What colour would you say his beard is, Athavul?”

  Athavul moved his arm and proved that his wrist would not come loose. His arrogance and mask of cocky confidence fled him faster than a street girl fled a man revealed poor. Tempus recognized Athavul’s chuckle; nervousness and sham. Tempus had heard it a thousand or a million times. What was the difference? He reflected on temporality, even while this boy Athavul temporized.

  “You going blind, Shadowspawn? You think myself is, and testing he and I?” With a harsh short laugh and a slap with his other hand on his own chest, Athavul said, “Black as this. Black as this!” He slapped his black leather pants—self consciously.

  Tempus, leaning a bit forwards, elbows on the little table, big swordsman’s shoulders hunched, continued, to gaze directly at Hanse. Into Hanse’s eyes. His face looked open because he made it that way. Beardless.

  “Same’s his hair?” Hanse said, and his voice sounded brittle as very old harness-leather. His eyes glittered.

  Athavul swallowed. “Hair…” He swallowed again, looking from Hanse to Tempus to Hanse. “Ah … he’s your, ah, friend, Hanse. Let go, will you? You twit him about his … head if you want to, but I won’t. Sorry I stopped and tried to be civil.”

  Without looking away from Hanse, Tempus said, “It’s all right, Athavul. My name is Thales and I am not sensitive. I’ve been this bald for years.”

  Hanse was stari
ng at Tempus, blond Tempus. His hand opened. Athavul yanked his arm back so fast he hit himself in his (nearly inexistent) stomach. He made no pretence of grace; with a dark glance at Hanse, he betook himself elsewhere, sullenly silent.

  “Nicely done,” Tempus said, showing his teeth.

  “Don’t smile at me, stranger. What do you look like?”

  “Exactly what you see, Hanse. Exactly.”

  “And … what did he see?” Hanse’s wave of his arm was as tight as he had become inside. “What do they see here, talking with Hanse?”

  “He told you.”

  “Black beard, no hair.”

  Blond, beardless Tempus nodded.

  Neither had taken his gaze off the other’s eyes. “What else?”

  “Does it matter? I am in the employ of that person we both know. What you people call a Hell Hound. I would not come here in that appearance! I doubt anyone else would be in this room, if they saw me. I was here when you came in, remember? Waiting for you. You were too cool to ask the obvious.”

  “They call me spawn of the shadows,” Hanse said quietly, slowly, in a low tone. He was leaning back as if to get a few more centimetres between him and the tall man. “You’re just a damned shadow!”

  “It’s fitting. I need your help, Shadowspawn.”

  Hanse said, enunciating distinctly, “Shit.” And rising he added, “Sing for it. Dance in the streets for it.” And he turned away, then back to add, “You’re paying of course, Baldy,” and then he betook himself elsewhere.

  Outside, he glanced up and down the vermiform ‘street’ called Serpentine, turned right to walk a few paces north. Automatically, he stepped over the broken plank in the boardwalk. He glanced into the tucked-in courtyard that was too broad and shallow to be dangerous for several hours yet. Denizens of the Maze called it variously the Outhouse, Tick’s Vomitory, or, less seriously, Safe-haven. From the pointed tail of the shortcloak on the man back within that three-sided box, Hanse recognized Poker the Cadite. From the wet sounds, he made an assumption as to Poker’s activity. The man with the piebald beard glanced around.