Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune

by Lynn Abbey

  So focused on his own target and the terrifying concern that he might lose the young man to darkness, Dysan did not notice the cloaked figure until Lone came directly upon it. The same man who had most recently left the apothecary now stood momentarily still in a place of silent darkness, measuring his path in the twilight. Agile as a cat, Lone slipped up beside him. Few would have noticed the fingers that dexterously untangled pouch strings from the other’s belt; but Dysan, trained to notice exactly such things, did. Lone had skill, though he clearly lacked practice. Dysan followed every nimble motion, using the distraction to carry out a theft of his own. Freeing his pouched bottle from his sash, he sneaked to Lone’s side and made the exchange.

  The cloaked man gave no sign that he noticed either of the thieves.

  Lone moved faster than thought. He spun toward Dysan, catching a handful of hair in a strong fist. A blade pricked Dysan’s abdomen, impaling his tunic and drawing a drop of blood. Had Dysan stood the proper height for a man his age, Lone’s hand would have his throat, and the knife would have threatened his left kidney. Startled more than hurt, Dysan loosed a screech and dropped the bottle. It thumped to the ground, rescued from breaking by the cloth pouch.

  The cloaked figure swung around at the sound. He pawed at his waist, then dove for the fallen pouch. “Hey, you thief! That’s mine!”

  Dysan tried to run, but Lone’s grip tightened, and he shoved. Dysan’s back slammed against a wall. Pain shocked through him, and he bit his tongue hard enough to draw more blood. Dazed, he barely had a chance to sag before Lone caught him properly by the neck, the dagger still menacing his vitals.

  The cloaked figure glanced at the two only an instant before snatching up the bottle and sprinting into the night.

  Dysan stared into Lone’s face, trying to hide his terror. The grim black eyes revealed nothing, and he had the predatory features of one accustomed to murder. Dysan knew he was going to die and horribly. He had seen that expression on the faces of the other Dyareelan pit-slaves, before they tore a man to pieces, laughing and howling with glee. His mouth went painfully dry, and he could feel his heart pounding like a hammer against his ribs. The situation, the rabid features, jogged a memory. Dysan abruptly realized he knew this man, and not only from the rumors writhing through the underground. Ten years ago and longer, this young man had shared the Pits of Dyareela with him. The Hand had called him Flea-Shit, one of many charming names they gave the children they trained to bloody service and also used as sacrifice. Lone had never claimed another name, so the orphans called him Nil, because where he clearly stood, they might find nothing an instant later.

  “Nil,” Dysan managed hoarsely. “Is that … you?”

  Lone’s expression hardened, and he examined Dysan in the failing light.

  Dysan tried to look brave, uncaring. Fear often inspired carnivores to blood frenzy, driving them to attack. Courage where fear should be made them cautious.

  Finally Lone spoke, “Dysan?” When he did, his grip and expression relaxed slightly. Though not a happy reunion, at least Lone no longer seemed intent on tearing out Dysan’s throat or slicing up his vitals. Neither wanted any reminder of their time in the Pits. Lone added coldly, “Don’t call me that. Not ever again.” He released his hold so suddenly, Dysan fell to the muddy ground.

  Scrambling to his feet, Dysan clutched his own throat and nodded.

  With a silent swirl of black cloth, Lone turned his back, the ultimate gesture of disdain. When a man so wary makes himself vulnerable, it is only because he knows the other is too weak or incompetent to harm him. “You have no idea what you just did.”

  Dysan believed he might, if he only had a couple of answers. “That paper you had translated. You stole that from still-living Hand?”

  “Yes.” Lone glanced over his shoulder, giving Dysan a hint of credit. “But they already had the potion mostly done. Once I knew what they needed, I realized they would send someone for that last ingredient, the one that required a healer to make.”

  Suddenly, it all came together. Dysan felt like the worst of fools for believing Lone himself worked for the cult. “The cloaked man.”

  Now, Lone turned back to face Dysan. He held a stance of supreme confidence, as if the entire world would bend to his whim, if he only asked. “I relieved him of that necessary ingredient. Then you, you …” He bit back whatever insult had nearly left his lips. Calling another pitchild sheep-shite stupid would only make him sound like the despicable masters they had escaped. “ … you gave it back!”

  “No.” Dysan displayed the other cloth-wrapped bottle, the one he had stolen from Lone. “It’s safe. It’s here.”

  Lone took the parcel from Dysan’s hand, pulled out the bottle, and studied it. He returned his attention to Dysan, his assurance only a trifle wilted. “This is …”

  “The potion.” Dysan smiled. “I switched it when I thought you carried …”

  Lone opened the bottle and took a cautious sniff before dumping the contents into the sodden murk of Sanctuary’s alley. Only after the entire potion lay splattered in the mud, Lone asked, “So … what was in the other bottle? The one the Hand will pour into their brew and inhale?”

  “Nothing special.” Dysan shrugged. “I just wanted the ritual to fail. It’s only water from a bleaching vat.”

  “A bleaching vat?” For an instant, Dysan thought he saw a sparkle pass through those flat-black killer’s eyes. “A bleaching vat?” Lone huffed out an unexpected laugh, a sound clearly unfamiliar to his usually deadly and serious repertoire. When a confused Dysan did not join his mirth, Lone explained, “The other main ingredient in that … mix of theirs is a vat of soured wine.”

  Dysan knew that. He had made the translation. “Yes.”

  “Do you know what happens when you mix bleach and vinegar?” Lone laughed again, this time with clear pleasure. “Deadly poison. One whiff, Dysan. That’s all it takes.”

  Dysan imagined the priests calling upon their hideous, twisted Mother, their hands mottled and sticky with tattoos, red ink, and blood. As the last ingredient entered the pot, they all sucked in a deep breath, seeking strength and finding only the death they had inflicted on so many others. He only hoped it was a painful way to die. He looked to Lone to ask him, but the other man had already melted into the growing shadows. Where he had once stood, Dysan saw nil, nothing.

  A smile on his face, Dysan ignored the pain still throbbing through his neck. His mothers would wonder about the tear in his tunic, the scratch on his belly, the bruises in the shape of fingers across his throat, but they would accept whatever explanation he gave them.

  Then, they would feed him.

  Pricks and Afflictions

  Dennis L. McKiernan

  Two words of many meanings …

  Glog!

  The wave shoved Rogi down again, and a great bubble exploded from his mouth as he spat the oath underwater: “Thshite!”

  Rogi fought his way upward, yet even as he broke through the surface—thnk!—the box slammed into the back of his head.

  Down went Rogi once more, the little hunchback now caught in the undertow and dragged along the mud and silt and sand.

  In spite of his panic, in spite of clawing for purchase even as the powerful riptide slammed him repeatedly into the bottom and rolled him and tossed him somersaulting, Ith thith the end of Rogi? he wondered.

  Just moments before, as he’d stumped along the western shore of the White Foal and swatted mosquitoes and shooed away gnats and picked off leeches while he hunted the rats who frequented the fringes of the Swamp of Night Secrets, rats that occasionally came out from the reeds to the shoreline to hunt small crustaceans and perhaps lick salt from the rocks, as the sinking sun hung low in the sky, Rogi had “thspotted a chetht” tossing to and fro in the whitecaps and tricky currents ’round the Hag’s Teeth, there where the furious rush of the White Foal met the cold surge of the sea. He saw the curious markings—runes mayhap—carven into the sides, and he guessed that
it was something “thpethial.” Perhaps the rumors were true about the strange wreck out on the Seaweal Reefs; maybe this chest had come from there. Quickly, Rogi had stripped off his clothes, pausing momentarily to admire his dragon, and then he had plunged headlong into the heavy waves yet cresting from a blow somewhere far out to sea. The shock of the cold water shrank his dragon down to minuscule proportions, but Rogi persevered, swimming an ungainly sidestroke against the white-crested billows rolling in from the south, and the swirling, gurgling river current rushing down from the north. With water cascading over him and the long red hair growing only on the right side of his head whipping about in the currents, gasping between crests, he made his way outward to fetch this curious artifact … or so he hoped it might be. After all, if it were “thomthing thpethial” his “mathter” would reward him handsomely … perhaps even enough to visit the ladies above the Yellow Lantern and make his dragon happy.

  But then a breaker had smashed him under and a swell had lifted him up and he had been hit in the back of the head by the box, and another roller had hammered him under again, where the undertow had grabbed him and hurled him along the bottom. And he had no air, yet needed to breathe, but could not, deep down as he was. And as he tumbled, the swift-running undercurrent crashed him against the skeletal ribs of the rotted remains of a longdrowned hulk, its keel deeply buried in the muck.

  Desperately, Rogi grabbed at the wooden beam and managed to hang on, and then, as if climbing a tree, he shimmied his way up the curved member, his diaphragm pumping hard against his clenched-shut lips, seeking to draw anything into his lungs, whether it be air or not. And with black spots swirling before his eyes … all of a sudden was free of the seaward pull of the deep tow.

  Now hastily scrambling upward, but still clinging to the sunken ship’s paling and with darkness sucking at his mind, at last his head broke free of the water, and—ghuu—uuh!—he sucked in sweet, sweet air, though with the offshore breeze blowing out from the swamp, others might not call it “sweet.” Yet to Rogi, nothing else in the troughs between combers had ever been so precious as the odiferous stench he sucked into his burning lungs.

  With waves yet crashing over him, Rogi tried spotting the chest, the little hunchback scanning about in the surge. “Dogths ballths!” he shouted—glug!—as another billow washed by, “I’ve lotht it!” for he could see nought of the box tossing among the foaming crests.

  Turning loose of the hulk’s rib, Rogi began awkwardly side-stroking in the direction of the tops of the waving reeds he could now and then see above the billowing whitecaps, and, struggling, at last he reached footing, muddy silt and sand though it was.

  Waves knocked him down several times ere he gained the shore and, drenched, water runnelling from his completely hairless left side but sopping his extremely hirsute right, he made his way toward his clothing.

  Rogi dressed quickly against the chill, for though the summer air was warm, the waters of both the ocean and the White Foal were startlingly cold. Even as he pulled on his breeks, he paused momentarily to mourn over his poor wrinkled dragon, but then hauled the pants up to his waist and cinched tight the rope he used for a belt. Throwing on his shirt with its too-long sleeves, he plopped down and slipped into his floppy-topped socks, one of his toes seeking freedom through a hole. At last he slipped into his shoes, with scrap leather stuffed inside to make him taller than his considerably short four foot six, though, hunched over as he was most of the time, he seemed more like three foot four. Finally, he flopped a great length of his long red hair from the right side of his head over the bald left side—the mother of all comb-overs, someone at the Vulgar Unicorn had called it—and jammed on his ear-flapped cap, tying the cord under his chin.

  As he turned to take up his blowpipe and drugged darts, “Vathankath’th member!” he cried, for in the fading light and washed ashore not ten feet away lay the rune-marked chest.

  Hâlott, looked up as the sound of a timid tap tapping came down the stairs from the weatherworn, heavy-planked, iron-bound door. “Rogi!” he hissed, his whispery voice sounding much like that of dead leaves stirring in a cold wind.

  Moments passed and the familiar scuttle of Rogi’s waddle did not come.

  “Rogi!” again Halott called out, if a hoarse rasping can be said to be a call.

  Tap-tap came the soft knock.

  Still Rogi did not respond.

  “Pah.” Hâlott set aside the long, thin-bladed flaying knife and stepped away from the half-skinned corpse on the table and headed for the stairs leading up to the first floor.

  Tap-tap.

  With skeletal, black-nailed fingers, Hâlott lifted the latch and swung the door inward. Just beyond stood a woman in a dark brown, coarse-spun cloak held tightly ’round.

  She cast back her hood. “My lord—” she began, and looked up into Hâlott’s face, and gasped and recoiled, half turning as if to flee. But then she mastered her panic, though not her rapidly beating heart and once more she faced this reputed necromancer. Before her she saw a tall, gaunt, cadaverous, dried-up, dark-robed being; perhaps he had once been a man, but no longer it seemed. He had parchmentlike yellowish brown skin stretched tightly over his completely bald skull, his face nought but sunken-in, hollow cheeks and a narrow, desiccated, hawklike nose, and his eye sockets covered with the skin of eyelids sewn shut. Even so, false eyes he had—painted in kohl—and the young woman flinched at the sight of them, for they reminded her of the markings on a death’s head moth. Long, bony, grasping fingers he had, and bony limbs from what she could see of his wrists and arms jutting out from partly rolled-up voluminous sleeves. And when his cadaverous whisper came—“Well?”—she was certain she was speaking to a corpse.

  Hâlott on the other hand saw before him a young woman, and surely a lady, for beneath the coarse-spun cloak she wore the quality and cut of her garments told a tale. Too, her ginger hair was well coifed and in the latest style, and she was quite clean. Her nails were well manicured, and she wore a ruby ring on a finger of her right hand, a ring Halott recognized.

  “What brings you here from the court, my lady?” Hâlott whispered.

  She gasped. “How did you—?”

  “I am Hâlott,” replied the necromancer, as if that explained all. “Won’t you step into my—”

  “No, no,” she blurted, drawing back from this, this creature . And she twisted the ring from her finger. “Lady Na—um, my mistress commanded me to bring you this.” Her hand trembled as she gingerly held out the ring, the circlet tentatively grasped between thumb and finger, the maiden no doubt hoping against hope that she wouldn’t come into contact with Hâlott’s withered digits. “Though I can see nothing wrong with it, my mistress says it needs repair. Yet when I suggested Thibalt the Rankan—Thibalt the Jeweler—could mend any ring, she said it must come to you. And so …”

  Hâlott’s blue-tattooed lips twitched in what was perhaps meant to be a grin, but appeared more like a grotesque facial tic instead. Again his hollow whisper sounded: “When?”

  “My lady says she needs it two days hence, for she would wear it at the courtyard gathering three days from now.” In spite of the repellent being before her, the young woman’s face lit in anticipation. “We are celebrating the visit of per-Arizak—he usually stays up in the hills, you know—and just about everyone will be there, and my mistress would wear her bloodred stones.”

  “Bloodred. How fitting,” said Hâlott, and again he smiled, this time more widely, his rictus exposing yellowed teeth.

  The woman flinched back.

  Hâlott held out his hand, palm up, and said, “Come back at this time two days hence. Tell—tell your mistress it will be ready by then.”

  With relieved smile on her face, for she did not have to touch the yellowed and no doubt dead skin, the young woman dropped the ring into Hâlott’s hand and turned and fled.

  At the palace, Nadalya, the golden-haired second wife of Arizak, stood in an alcove and whispered to fair-haired Andriko, and fr
om the cast of his face and hair he, like Nadalya, was clearly of Rankan blood. The tongue they spoke was neither Rankene, Ilsigi, Irrune, nor even the bastardized Wrigglie. Instead in hushed tones they spoke Yenizedi, a language not likely to be understood by anyone else in this part of the palace.

  “Driko, I would have you ride into the hills and find me a hornet’s nest, or that of wasps,” she murmured as the setting sun shone through a nearby casement and cast a ruddy light over all. “Make certain that it is plugged or contained in some manner so that they cannot escape, though I will need a means to set them free.”

  “My lady?” Andriko’s blue eyes widened in disbelief. “A hornet’s nest? Oh, ’tis the season, and I’ve seen one out in the hills, but hornets, wasps?”

  Momentarily, Nadalya’s face flashed in ire, but then she smiled and said, “Yes, Driko. I would have the nest, a large one at that, with many of the stingers inside. It is for a … demonstration I have in mind.”

  Andriko shrugged nonchalantly, though a bit of a frown of puzzlement yet lingered on his face. “I can get a small wooden cask or box and enclose a nest therein.”

  Nadalya nodded, but then her eyes lit up. “Better yet, Driko, seal them in a clay jar, one that is easily broken.”

  “A clay pot when broken, my lady, makes a sound.”

  “Oh, Driko, you are right. Perhaps a box is better.”

  “Yes, my lady,” said Driko. “When do you need this—?”

  “No later than early morn three days from now, Driko.”

  “The day of the courtyard affair?”