Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune

by Lynn Abbey

  Counting the necklace lost, he darted for the door, only to run headlong into Bezul’s wife.

  “Here, now.” She caught his arms, and gentle but firm, made him lift his head. She tsked softly and wrapped a kind arm around his shoulders.

  Kind. So why did he still feel like a prisoner?

  “What’s going on, Bezul?” she asked, over his averted head.

  “The boy here wanted to trade this for a shirt and a blanket. Take a look. Tell me what you think.”

  She made him look up again. “Promise me you won’t run?”

  He swore, his voice breaking, and threw himself back in the chair. She picked the necklace up; lamplight caught the moonstone ring on her finger, making it glow with life. A beautiful stone … with a setting that failed to do it justice. All urge to escape faded in the face of that beautiful stone, how he’d set it, given half a—

  Chersey exclaimed softly, then moved over to the lamp, and all thought of the ring vanished. If he hadn’t been terrified, the look on her face would have made him happier than he’d been in … a very long time.

  “Beautiful. So very delicate. I haven’t seen work like this since …” Her voice trailed off and her eyes lifted to meet her husband’s. Then she turned to Kadithe, lifted his face with a finger beneath his chin, then brushed his hair back from his eyes to study him the same way she’d studied the necklace. “Where is he, child? We heard his shop was ruined, burned to the ground, that he died.”

  He said nothing, only wished desperately that he could leave.

  She chuckled softly, the way Grandfather chuckled when he recalled his time in the palace. “He was always so proud of his bronze-work, his statues. He never appreciated … Of course, it wasn’t stylish. Large, ostentatious, that’s what the nabobs wanted. But the jewelry he made was for his daughter-in-law. She was small, delicate.” She smiled at him; he shuddered. “A lot like you, child.”

  He ground his teeth. Delicate wasn’t something he wanted to be. Delicate didn’t survive what he’d survived these last years. o way. No froggin’, shite’n way in hell.

  “He says he made it.”

  “Does he, now?” She took his hands before he kenned her intent, studied them from all angles, touching the calluses, the tiny pricks and cuts the metal left, apologized when she inadvertently pressed a still-raw burn, then smiled and placed the necklace in his hands before releasing him altogether. “He’s taught you well.” She settled on the edge of the desk. “So, husband, how are we going to help this talented young man?”

  “What about the shop?” Bezul asked.

  “We’re out. Says so on the door. Don’t change the subject. He’s not, I take it, a member of that annoying guild.”

  Bezul raised a brow It him; he shook his head. He didn’t know what guild she was talking about, but he shite’n sure wasn’t a member.

  “Thought not. He’s far too young. They have all those rules. As if that necklace shouldn’t be evidence enough.”

  “What … rules?” he whispered, before he could shut his fool mouth. It was a dream she offered, not reality. He’d just wanted to exchange the damned necklace for a blanket.

  “You must put in your time with a master—”

  “Meaning you have to pay someone who’s paying huge sums to the guild for the privilege of being slave labor for at least five years.”

  Pay for the right to make things? He shook his head. “Impossible.” Not even if he had the money.

  “There must be some way around it. Look at this, Bezul. He’s done his time. How long, child? How long have you worked with Harnet?”

  His eyes went funny, his head light. He hadn’t heard Grandfather’s name in over five years. Had learned not even to think it. Secrecy, Kadithe. It’s our only chance.

  “S-since I was four … five ..” He couldn’t remember the first time he’d sat next to his grandfather, high on a stool, a tiny mallet clutched in his hand. “Something like.”

  “There. You see?”

  “And where is he? Harnet’s been gone for five years and more. Is he a paying master, boy?”

  He shrugged. Shook his head.

  “But he’s still alive.” His wife persisted.

  Bile rose in his throat. Fear such he hadn’t known for many long years. He began to shake, tried again for the door, and found himself ensnared in her arms.

  “Please,” he whispered, in the hoarse voice that was all he had left these days, “please, may I just have the blanket. It—” He choked and got the words out, owing these people who spoke fondly of Harnet Mur at least that much. “It’s for my grandfather.”

  She set him back on his chair. “Why didn’t you just say so? Pride is a shortcut to hell, child.” She picked up a slate and began writing. “Blanket. Shirt. What else?”

  “You’ll trade then?”

  “Wasting time, young man. What else?”

  Bezul nodded and slipped out the door, evidently counting the deal closed—or in the hands of a master.

  “P-pissing pot?” he whispered, his face hot as ever it could get, and she added it to her list with only a hint of a twitch to her kind mouth. One by slow one, he added those small items they’d done without for so long, waiting for her to stop him, unable to believe the necklace could possibly be worth as much as she was allowing. When he asked, hesitantly, for an iron skillet and she agreed, he began to suspect charity, and closed his mouth, firmly, resenting the position she’d put him in, wondering what her angle must be.

  “So,” she said, scanning the list. “Fair enough, though if you’d used anything better than agates in it, I’d owe you. Think you can carry all this at once?”

  “Safer if I made more than one trip.”

  Safer was not lost on her. Bezul’s shop was in the Shambles, opposite the Maze. Safe was a concept she well understood.

  “I’ll get Ammen or Jopze to deliver it. Where do you live?”

  “I’ll come back,” he said firmly. No way he was leading these people to home.

  Again, that gentle smile that saw through him. “Good enough. I’ll get it ready”

  As she left, Bezul returned, carrying something in his hand. It was a spool. A spool of fine, copper wire.

  “You know what to do with this?” he asked, and Kadithe, unable to take his eyes from that treasure, nodded. “I want you to take it. Make beautiful things. Bring them here to me. I don’t want you or that grandfather of yours wanting. Ever. You need something, you come and ask. We’ll work it out. Understand?”

  Understand? He understood nothing except that he’d betrayed Grandfather’s trust. And yet, as the numbness in his mind eased, somehow … some god must be smiling on him, because it was just possible that it would all work out for the best.

  Still not altogether certain he wasn’t dreaming, he gathered up the beautiful wire, stammered something he hoped was thanks, and escaped.

  He was home before he remembered the two bundles lying beside the doorway of Bezul’s Exchange.

  The rocky reef had one high point about the size of a ship’s boat when the tide was in, one rock a man could sit on that was above the fetch of the waves with a south wind driving. So Camargen sat, sodden down to his boots. A man could freeze, in such a wind, even under the burning late-summer sun.

  Flotsam went by from time to time, washing past the reef, and he had snagged a few boards, but nothing yet of a size. Cordage had washed up, a kind of a garland on the seaward side, and it was gray and rotten, as Camargen’s clothes were grayed and aged and his sword and dirk were rusted. He was not aged. He was sunburned. His hands, ripped bloody from the reef rocks when he had washed up, were still young hands, and his jaw had only the ordinary stubble of beard.

  Sorcerers. Sorcerers, sorcery, and magic flung about, insubstantial and unseeable until it hit a ship and the wood rotted in an instant. He was through with sorcery, had no future use for the whole sorcerous breed—but then, he had no future at all, so far as he could see, alternately freezing and baking
on this cursed rock, the outlines of which he knew down to a nicety, low tide and high. Today there was a dead fish floating in the garland of cable, if he wanted to get that desperate for moisture and food. He was not a fastidious man, but he was not yet at his limits. A piece of the Widowmaker or the Fortunate big enough to carry him to shore might yet come along—shore was just hazily visible on the horizon as a line of surf, so close he sometimes thought he might swim it. But where there was shipwreck, there were scavengers and predators, and sharks figured in his hesitation. Being a blue-water sailor bred and born, he was not that good a swimmer, and the fear of sharks and suchlike monsters being well-engrained, he stayed put.

  So he watched planks go by, and snagged another one before it escaped, wood almost gone to punk from rot. While he was off his rock and soaking his feet, he hauled the rotten cordage a little higher on his diminished shore, seeing it as a means to tie the whole together. He would make a raft, if enough bits and pieces bumped up against his little refuge.

  Of his crew, or the Fortunate’s, no sight nor sign, not unless one counted a scrap of cloth or two.

  A barrel went by, a mostly empty beef-barrel, it might be, but too far to reach, damn it all. He watched it go.

  Then his eye shifted to another thing, a small boat, a scrap of sail, hazy in the distance, inshore of the reef. He watched it. He took off his coat and waved it like a banner. And that boat tacked and came closer, working up the wind, a long, slow process.

  There were fishing villages hereabouts. And that was what he saw, as the boat came closer, a small, single-sailed fishing boat, not even a two-man vessel, clumsy and broad of beam, lumbering this way and that as it came.

  He stood waiting, finally, as it nosed gingerly up to his perch, riding cautiously where there was water enough to keep its keel off the rock. An old man managed it.

  “Cast me a line!” Camargen said, an order—it was habit, and he tried to mend his ways. He saw he’d startled the old man, who sat with his hand on the tiller and his sail swinging back and forth, slack, and the boat just too far to reach. The old man mumbled something unintelligible in the rush and suck of water, then stood up and flung him the line.

  Camargen caught it and pulled, the two of them working the boat closer to the rock until it bumped and he jumped aboard, instinctively finding his footing in a slovenly tangle of rope and net.

  The old man said something about a ship, a wreck, he made that much out. And then the old man picked up a pole in a menacing way, and held out his hand palm up.

  The hell, Camargen said to himself, and several things occurred to him: one, that this man wanted money, which he had; that the old man had a weapon he might then use, having said money; and third, that this was a perfectly serviceable, if stinking, boat.

  He grabbed the threatening pole in one bloodied hand, grabbed it with the other, and wrenched over hard, which carried the startled old man overside.

  He strode aft and grabbed the tiller, hauled the rope in, and watched the old man splash toward the boat. He let the wind back the boat off a little, and the old man turned and splashed toward the rock, where he hauled himself up, dripping, onto the sole safe refuge.

  “I’ve started a raft there,” he called to the old man. “Good luck to you.”

  “Damn you,” he thought he made out for a reply, but he’d been, overall, polite. He bowed, and turned the boat before the wind, bringing the sail close, and sailed away, sweet as could be, with a wind off the quarter and a lubberly old boat that could even sing a bit, once the wind got behind her.

  There were the fishing villages—not necessarily a good thing, to come sailing into such small places with another man’s boat—but there was plenty of coastline to choose from and there was net and line. He’d not starve.

  But as the shore came nearer he saw a smudge of smoke, smoke which proved to cover a broad spot on the horizon.

  A signal fire, he thought. Was it a smoky signal fire, someone summoning other survivors?

  He aimed the little craft for it, and sailed, even kicking up a little spray from the bow as the wind blew inshore. He was wet. He was cold, and the wind grew colder as the boat ran, so that he sank down as much into shelter as he could get, and wrapped a dirty tarpaulin about himself, leaving only his hand on the tiller and his face exposed to the chill.

  The smudge came clearer, as the haze above a settlement, but such a settlement. He saw other boats, and kept clear of them; and he saw taller masts, and a huddle of buildings big enough to been seen from a distance through the haze.

  It was no village. It was a whole damned town. A city, where no city ought to be.

  Anonymity was possible, in such a place of size.

  But his charts had been wrong. There was nothing here. There could be nothing.

  He sailed closer, no longer quite trusting his senses—his charts, he had greater faith in, but they had proved false. He sailed closer and closer, beyond a short breakwater, to a ship-channel and what was a fair-sized deepwater harbor, with quays all brown, weathered board and precious little paint, the town rising, all brown boards, beyond it. He felt far from conspicuous as he nosed his stolen boat up to the side of a long, sparse boardwalk, tied onto a piling beside a boarding ladder, and climbed up onto the level of the town.

  People came and went. Chimneys gave out smoke. Nobody’s clothes were in much better case, his having lost most of their color. The harbor stank of fish and the dockside was as scurvy a place as Pirate’s Rest up in the Isles. It felt, in short, like a homecoming of sorts.

  He walked, still sodden, but no longer quite so cold, down the boards and onto the stony walk of solid ground, walked with a sailor’s roll to his step, but not the only such hereabouts.

  A harbor with room for ships of size, though he saw nothing larger than a channel-runner in port at the moment in this backwater place. The Widowmaker was lost, taking with her the best crew a man could ask, but he was alive, he had gold in his pocket, probably more than adequate for a start in this town, and he could live, gather a small crew about him—and wait for a likely ship to come in. He’d buy new charts, too. Damn the mapmaker.

  All around him he heard the fisherman’s accent, a handful of words discernible and those few uninformative. He could read signs, spelling as indifferent as any in the Rest. One sign marked an inn, as he took it. It said, THE BROKEN MAST, with a piece of cracked spar above the door.

  If a man was looking for fellow seamen, that looked apt enough. Broken Mast it was. He needed a dry place, food, and a bed.

  He walked into the mostly deserted inn at this hour, picked the scarred table nearest the fire, and threw himself into a creaking wooden chair.

  “Wan drink?” the bartender yelled, and something that sounded like come here. Every man in this damned town talked with marbles in his mouth—a dialect, and a muddy one, like the town itself.

  There was, however, a universal shortcut. Camargen felt at his waist for his purse and, among its currency of various climes and kingdoms, extracted a coin of small size … gold, however. It winked in the general gloom of the place.

  “You want this?”

  The barkeep drew a big pewter mug and brought it to the table.

  “Room,” Camargen said, keeping converse to small words, and the barkeep made a try at the coin. “Food,” Camargen insisted, retaining it.

  They made do with few words, which turned out to involve a small roasted fowl, nondescript greens—welcome, after months at sea—and a bowl of grayish duff, not to mention an upstairs room for an indeterminate number of days, all for the same small coin.

  Left to his own devices, Camargen wedged the chair in front of the door, pitched the filthy sheets onto the floor, and slept, rusty sword in hand, for a good number of hours.

  Deadly Ritual

  Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Dysan awakened to sunlight streaming through a high window, dust motes swirling in the beam. He yawned and stretched luxuriously across his pallet of piled straw, en
joying the soft touch of a knitted blanket against his naked flesh. Though a small room, barely three paces across, it seemed like a mansion to him. It still carried the sawdust and mortar scents of new construction, and he could faintly hear the sounds of movement and light murmurs of conversation in the other rooms of Sabellia’s haven. He had no furniture, just his two sets of clothing lying in neat piles in each far corner, a chamber pot, and a bowl of water for washing. He could never remember feeling so content, so fabulously wealthy. All this, and the five ladies who spread Sabellia’s word, every one of whom he called “Mama.”

  For the first time, Dysan appreciated the disease that had damaged him in the womb. Its effects, combined with the poison he had unwittingly consumed along with the other Dyareelan orphans slated to die, had stunted any chance he had ever had for normal height The size of a seven-year-old, he passed for one without much difficulty, though he was already a decade older. The priestesses babied him and worried that he never ate enough to pack weight onto his skinny frame. Someday, they would notice that he never grew at all and begin to wonder about his true age; but, for now, he intended to enjoy their pampering for as long as possible.

  Dysan wriggled out of bed and dressed in his regular clothing. Though patched and faded, his tunic lacked the filthy crunchiness to which he had become accustomed; his mothers insisted on regular washings. Thin and soft, it barely kept out the soggy dankness that defined Sanctuary, but it no longer scratched or abraded his skin. He appreciated far less the frequent scrubbings that finally seemed to have banished the mites and fleas that had plagued him most of his life. Though no part of him had properly matured, tooth gritting and mental distraction could not dispel the unholy thoughts that assailed him whenever the youngest of his mothers, SaKimarza, washed certain places.

  Dysan pictured her now, her fine Rankan features softened by a cascade of russet hair with just a touch of gold, her body soft and curvy in all the best places. Thoughts of her stiffened him, and he cursed the affliction he had cherished just moments before, the one that allowed this one awkward remnant of adolescence to blossom in an otherwise childish body. She was only five years older than he, yet as unattainable as the goddess herself. He called her “Mama”; she thought he was seven.