Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune

by Lynn Abbey

  She was pretty sure that he yelled at her then, but it was hard to tell because amazingly the rain started coming down even harder.

  It hadn’t let up, and they had gone to bed having nothing better to do. She smiled as the pleasant near-memory filled her head and thought seriously about waking Kaytin up … after all, she couldn’t sleep.

  She shook her head. She needed to think, and while that helped her sleep it certainly didn’t help her think.

  The cult was growing, and she didn’t know how. She kept killing them, and they kept coming … and what if Kaytin was right and they were on to her? What if they had figured out that she was the one depleting their numbers? There could be assassins at every corner waiting for her.

  Not that she couldn’t handle it, just that it would be a giant nuisance.

  On the one hand, killing them a few here and a few there kept her in good, steady work. On the other hand, she never wanted there to be any chance that the cult could gain control again. She’d heard enough to know that their reign hadn’t been a pleasant one. Kaytin had insisted that one of the ones she had killed was speaking in a strange tongue, and she had to admit she didn’t recognize it.

  She had buried that guy outside the city walls a couple of months ago. Maybe the Bloody Hand was a bigger problem than anyone knew.

  The Irrune were in control here now; she was Irrune, and better than that she had grown up in Arizak’s court. It should have given her just the in she needed. But it did just the opposite because her father sat at the leader’s shoulder and convinced him that every word out of Kadasah’s mouth was nothing but a slanderous lie.

  Which hardly seemed fair.

  The key was getting her father to believe her.

  But how?

  Then as lightning splashed across the sky brightly enough that she could see it through the cracks in the door, and thunder roared loud enough to make Kaytin jump, she had the answer.

  She woke Kaytin up to celebrate.

  “What do you want?” Tentinok asked in a slur from where he sat at the corner table in the Golden Gourd.

  “You might at least wait for me to sit before you dismiss me outright,” Kadasah said, sitting down. “I’ve brought you an ale—your favorite.” She slid the glass toward him, hugging her own in her hand.

  “A drink will hardly buy my forgiveness, daughter. I’m surprised they’d let you in here, as much damage as you’ve done to the place in the past.”

  Kadasah gave him a curious look. “Now, how would you know that?”

  “One hears things. You sent word, I’m here, that’s more than you deserve.” He spat across the table.

  Kadasah sighed, took a drink from her tankard, and then watched as Tentinok did the same, as usual downing half the tankard with his first drink. “I’ll keep it short … I tried to tell Arizak before, to tell all of you, but no one would listen to me. Well, now I have proof,” Kadasah said.

  “Proof of what?”

  “That you haven’t cleaned this city of the Bloody Hand by a long shot …”

  “Oh … you aren’t going to start that again.”

  “They’re hiding in tunnels under the Street of Red Lanterns. But it’s worse, so much worse than that.” She lowered her voice. “They’re not all marking themselves anymore. They’re walking around with the rest of us pretending to be normal. As I told you before, they have infiltrated Arizak’s court.”

  “What do you hope to gain from these lies?”

  “Tentinok … Father. I have proof. Only two nights ago … no, wait it was three, or four perhaps. It was before the big storm, and it lasted for two days, so I think four days …”

  “Do get on with it. You said you were going to keep it short, and I’m not growing any younger.”

  “I saw a man who I recognized as a member of Naimun’s entourage. He went down into one of the tunnels. A few minutes later a man in a hooded robe came out of the tunnels. He was one of the followers of Dyareela. I fought with him, and as I fought with him this man you have been sharing the palace with came out of the hole, praised the Dark Lady and attacked me. I cut him, but he and his twisted friend both got away.”

  “What is this man’s name, Kadasah? I have seen no wounded man in Naimun’s entourage or in the palace at all, perhaps you didn’t hurt him badly …”

  “Or perhaps I gave him a fatal wound, and he has crawled off to some dark place to die. Perhaps because they failed his brothers have hacked him and his friend to pieces and thrown him into the swamp.”

  “What is the man’s name?”

  “I … well, don’t remember his name, but I recognized him, I swear.”

  He laughed at her then. “And your word holds so much weight because … you are a creature of virtue? Again, Kadasah, what is it that you hope to gain with your story?” He finished the rest of the ale in his tankard then fell forward onto the table.

  When Tentinok awoke the world was dark, and he wondered for a minute if he had died. His vision was blurred, and his head felt … well, dusty.

  “He’s very heavy,” a male voice complained.

  “I was about to think that not even a six-times dose of the sleeping potion was going to knock him out,” Kadasah’s voice said. “Then I was glad we had that strengthening potion or I don’t think even the two of us could have moved him.”

  “Maybe you gave him too much. He’s not moving at all. Maybe he isn’t going to wake up.”

  “And maybe I’m going to wake up and kill you both,” Tentinok roared as he stumbled to his feet, staggering like a drunk.

  “Quiet,” Kadasah ordered in a whisper, “you’ll bring all of them down upon our heads.”

  “Who, Kadasah? There is no one here. Just some dark, dank,” he lifted a foot and shook it, “very wet tunnel.”

  “They are here, and if you make too much noise we’ll have them all to fight at once,” she assured him. “Now come on.” Candle in hand she moved forward. A young man pressed a candle into his hand, and Tentinok glared at him, sure he knew what this foreign man was to his daughter.

  He followed, and as he did so his head began to clear, enough that he began to wonder why he was following them at all. Especially when the water started to get deeper and they still hadn’t shown him anything but half-flooded tunnels.

  “Kadasah,” he said in a whisper, “there is nothing here. No one.”

  “The storm it must have driven them further in,” Kadasah said.

  Suddenly a man ran out of the darkness through the mud, and Kadasah easily took him down. The man fell into the water covering the floor of the cave, and Kadasah handed her candle to the young man and dragged the body from the mud. She held the man’s tattooed face up for her father to see. “See, Father? Is it not just as I have said? He’s one of them.” With her sword she cut one of the tattoos off and stuck it in her pouch—Tentinok didn’t even want to know why—then she dropped the body, took her candle back from the man, and kept walking.

  “One man is not dozens and proves no connection to the palace,” Tentinok said, but he followed until the water had hit waist deep and the tunnel in front of them—where it started to go deeper into the earth—was completely submerged. “Kadasah … there is no one else here. Just one cultist, probably alone.”

  “No,” Kadasah said urgently. “I tell you, these caves are normally filled with activity. They must have gotten flooded out during the storm and they are temporarily hiding somewhere else.”

  He wanted to believe her. Not because he wanted to for one second think that the Bloody Hand could get a foothold in Sanctuary ever again, but just because she seemed so earnest, and she had gone to all the trouble of … drugging him and dragging him here to get all wet. His patience eroded. He turned around and started stomping—not at all easy with all the mud—back the way they had come.

  The others followed after him. “Father, I swear to you …”

  “Quiet! Your words mean nothing to me. You drug me and you bring me here. You tell me st
ories of one of our own who is a hidden cultist, and yet you have no proof, you do not even know his name. You show me one cultist and tell me there are hundreds.” He tripped then, landing in the muck and succeeding in getting himself covered to the very top of his head. He wiped the water and mud from his face and spit, then he screamed. “Never, never darken my door again! Never contact me. Just leave me be!”

  Tentinok walked into the palace slinging mud and water and looking ready to kill.

  “What happened to you?” Naimun asked with a smile.

  “Don’t ask,” Tentinok growled back.

  “Bad day?”

  “You might say that, once again problems with Kadasah. I’m just going to go get cleaned up, get into some dry clothes, and forget the whole sordid ordeal. What brings you to this part of the palace at this hour?”

  “I’m a bit concerned. No one has seen Kopal in four days running. You haven’t seen him about have you?”

  “No … which means we might have a much bigger problem.”

  Kaytin lay quietly, not at all exhausted and still relishing the words he had heard. “Enough, enough!” his beloved had cried out.

  “So, I know most of the day didn’t go so well, but that wasn’t so bad.”

  “It was amazing,” Kadasah said, and she sounded truly sincere, as if all the day’s events had been forgotten in their lovemaking.

  Kaytin hoped the healer stayed thankful for a very long time. Turned out all he really needed was a little extra strength.

  Dark of the Moon

  Andrew Offutt

  In the final night of its waning the moon was a mere pale sliver that played hide-and-seek among the few blue-gray clouds lounging above the fired old town called Sanctuary. The lone walker under that pallid excuse for a moon was in her late teens or perhaps early twenties.

  She did not look nearly as stupid as she did attractive, and yet here she was, a pretty-enough young woman demonstrating a contra-survival lack of intelligence and good judgment by turning down the paved narrowness of an alleged street well shadowed by multistory tenements. Why did not she, even as a foreigner to Sanctuary, at least suspect that she had entered a cul-de-sac forming one of the most dangerous traps any city could provide?

  Lurking here in a less-than-savory area of the town named Sanctuary and sometimes sarcastically referred to as Thieves’ World, the alley whimsically called Sunshine Street existed for two blocks only. Its narrow length was mostly unlit and barely wide enough for the passage of a one-horse cart. Little sound invaded such a narrow walkway between tall tenements. The dying moon was a mere sickle in its final quarter, but happened to be almost directly overhead. Thus it lit the alley well enough to make it possible to distinguish only the brightest colors.

  Perhaps that bright light dulled the suspicions of the lone walker—and perhaps also dulled her mind? At any rate, it also created many shadows and lurking places, and they yielded two men.

  Chestnut brown of eye and of hair with a mild tendency to curl, the prey was more than comely. The predators were not, and both were considerably larger than her height and build. Both men wore dark clothing and sharp steel and neither was small. The smaller or rather less large accoster was neither good-looking nor ugly of face capped by wispy, hair-colored hair. He wore his soft cap of dark red at a jaunty angle that he probably felt made him rakishly attractive, a belief without foundation. The larger one had a large, dark brown growth of hair that wandered over the whole lower part of his face—not a beard, really, for that implied some gardening. Unfortunately the area concealed by that foliage did not include his nose, an unsightly growth that some might have likened to a truncated sausage.

  “Just be a good little dummy and hand over that pretty-pretty bracelet, girl,” the larger one said, clutching a gentle moon of breast through her clothing, “and we won’t kill you after the rape.”

  Her valiant struggling was to absolutely no avail against their strength. The night air was ripped by the sound of gasps, grunts, scraping footsteps, and tearing cloth. The outcome of that worse-than-uneven struggle was not in question.

  “Damn!” the smaller of the two attackers said—not a small man at all, under his rakishly canted cap, but his hair-faced companion was a veritable bear. That accounted for his nickname, which was Wall. He wrested their prey against his namesake with a heavy sound of the impact of her left shoulder and arm and the squeak that forcible contact brought from her throat. Even so she sent a kick high up between the legs of the cap-wearer and did her best to bite the arm of the one who had the better grip on her.

  “That there is gonna cost you the use of that leg for a long time,” he snarled, close to her ear—which was tickled by his veritable jungle of dark brown facial hair.

  Alone in the unlighted street all three participants froze at the sound of a quiet voice from an unseen source. Sounding calm, it wafted down to them from above. Three heads jerked upward and three pair of night-large pupils stared.

  “You don’t really mean to be doing this, boys,” that same voice said, as if stating plain fact that all should know. “You two just stop that nastiness and go along your way and maybe you’ll get to see the sunrise.”

  Adrenaline spurted. Hairs rose abristle on two napes; the fine chestnut hairs on the back of the young woman’s neck were already erect. Squatting almost at the very edge of the roof a few feet above them in seeming supreme confidence was a slender youth little beyond his boyhood. Partly because of his squat and partly because his clothing was uniformly darker than that of the assailants, he did not look at all large. The silver slice of moon was high above his right shoulder, making his face a featureless shadow while affording him a clear view of the features, at least, of all three land-bound members of the encounter.

  The bigger of the pair of assailants chuckled. “H’lo there, little feller. Careful you don’t fall off that there roof. You really think you can handle us both?” Without haste, he reached across the area where his tunic bloused over his belt buckle. There hung a sheath of unadorned old leather. From it he slid a knife as long as his thigh.

  The level, quiet voice did not change, nor did the shadow-man move. “I really think I can handle you both without raising a sweat, you big cow.”

  This time it was the other man who fouled the night with the sound of his voice. “You’re talking to Wall, and he’s a bull, not a cow, you froggin’ piece of shite!”

  “Careful. I’ve heard both those stupid words so damned much in the past few weeks from too damned many copycats. I swore to carve the nose off any fraggin’ piece of bat-shite who used both at once.”

  The big man chuckled again. He had made no move to lift his long knife. “Who in the seven hells are you, boy?”

  The chosen victim of the arrogant pair was doing her best to edge away. Shadows beckoned …

  And yet even she froze at the reply of the would-be rescuer on the roof.

  “I am called Shadowspawn.”

  “Sheeeeee-ite!”

  “Not likely. My daddy knowed that oddling called Shadow-spawn. If that freggin’ super-thief is alive, he’s got to be older than rocks.”

  The youth on the roof was not above theatricality in heaving a great sigh. “You’ve had your warning, ugly. A wise man once told me that a fool and his life are soon parted. You don’t have to go proving that.”

  The man who was not as large as his companion grabbed their chosen victim by means of hooking a hairy and muscular arm across her throat. From behind her and above her head he glowered up at the accoster.

  “I’d say you’re the one about to prove it, you fruggin’ shike!” he said. “Git far away from here and do it fast, or I break her scrawny neck.”

  The squatting human shadow on the roof’s edge said, “Still making foolish noises, are you? Seems to me it’s a very pretty neck. Well, I warned you.”

  And then in a blurred movement his hand rushed up and back and then forward, his lower forearm just brushing his ear. The result was that t
he wide-eyed prisoner heard the little humming sound that terminated in a metallic shing accompanying a thud. Of course she was not able to see the way the forehead below the soft red cap sprouted a silvery-shining steel throwing star. Four and a half points were in evidence, meaning that one and half of another were mostly imbedded. Yes, even in bone.

  “Your pond-scum fool of a friend has just joined his dog-relatives in the Cold Hell, big cow,” the roof-squatter said, low. “Are you ready to join him and them?”

  The big man turned out to be not as stupid as he looked. Without pausing to consider, he ran

  The far from conventional hero of the little affray dropped down just as the victim, released by the fall of the man behind her, also sank to the pave. The shoulder of her mint-green tunic was torn to what most male observers would consider an interesting degree. She stared up at her rescuer from large dark eyes widened by wonder. He was nowhere near the size of the beast he had just frightened off. He was also positively bristling with sharp steel in various lengths.

  “You … you saved me—a stranger!” She spoke those wondering words in an accent that was not born in Sanctuary.

  He shrugged, and squatted beside her to look into a pretty, oval face that tapered down to an almost pointed chin. And oh, what skin! “True.”

  She gazed up into a dusky face with features that made him appear to be in his teens. Except for the eyes. Strangely old, those eyes were, and accustomed to seeing ugliness. He was not a bad-looking youth, her hero, with a sensuous mouth, hooded eyes, and shaped brows. He wore unalleviated black, as if his goal was to be a living shadow, and his jet hair had not been cut in at least two years. It was pulled back into a horse-tail, pulled through a short, narrow sheath of dark leather.

  “Did you k—is he dead?”

  “Likely.”

  “Are you really called Shadowspawn?”