by Lynn Abbey
On the twenty-first day they had an argument over nothing in particular and spent most of a day and all night making up and trying to atone to each other.
On the first night of moondark, however, Lone left his woman in their new home while he saw to business, and next morning, for the first time in thirty days and nights, another young man had been lured or surprised in a narrow alley and hideously clawed and bitten, and his lungs ripped out—to be consumed?
Again Sanctuary exploded with horror, anger, fear, and endless exchange of opinions and speculations.
After a month, “everybody knew”—that is, many many regulars in the market—that daily the darling couple bought breakfast or lunch from Scaff. That partially explained the fact that the same pair of Sharda investigator appeared there to, as they told Scaff and others, talk to Lone. They knew he had been out last night, and wanted to know where he had been and what he had done. Sayn and Ixma waited a long time before at last deciding they had been idle long enough, and went away.
Lone and Janithe did not show up until over an hour later, for some reason both lovers had slept both deeply and late.
“I saw the inhuman thing that killed those fellows last month,” Lone said, frowning, “and I’m the one found the body, and I told people, and the Sharda man came to question me. Now it has happened again, and however he found out I was not home last night, he did. Naturally he suspects me … and Scaff, I didn’t kill anybody—but I can’t tell him where I was last night, either.”
Scaff understood. “In that case, Lone, Janny—do not turn around. Just walk around my booth and get yourself out of here, fast. A man of the City Watch is heading this way with his hand on his pommel, and it ain’t me he’s got his eye on.”
“Go left,” Lone muttered, and Janithe did while he went rightward, and around Scaff’s place of business and across a thronged aisle and between two other vendors and cut left and on a ways farther and then left and between two other stalls, and left, and through the crowd, and out of the market. Only then did he unexcitedly say, “Run,” and they did.
“Master,” a frowning Komodoflorensal said, “look here. That ornate bracer I learned of … it has to do with the daughter of the ancient beast-god of the sea.”
His master turned on the apprentice a frown of his own, almost a murderous one. “Are you speaking of Ka’thulu?”
“Aye, Uncle ‘Lonikas! Ka’thulu!”
“Nonsense, idiot! Let me see your alleged work, fool. That fancy bauble could not possibly be—name of Consternatis! A miracle! For once you are right!”
“I’m glad my man found you,” a grim-faced Strick told Chance, the moment that man and his cane tap-tapped their way into his office-cum-spelling chamber.
A bit red of face and panting from the effort of hurrying in response to the urgent summons of his friend, Chance sank down in the chair across the long, blue-draped table that was the white mage’s desk. He was surprised to find Linnana also present
“Rushing across town is not so easy as it once was,” he gasped, and accepted the towel Linnana proffered. He wiped his face and set his hand to his chest, a bit left of center. There was that irregular pounding again, damn it. “What is so urgent?”
“We have work to do,” Strick said, with no lessening of the deadly seriousness of his face or manner. “Lone has to be warned, and more. That long bracer on Janithe’s arm is one the beast-god Ka’thulu gave to his daughter when he proclaimed her the sklamera, chief among the demons of his domain—the sea.”
“Ah gods,” Strick said, seeming to grow smaller in his chair. “You talk of sorcery! Ach, Ils our Father knows how I hate sorcery!”
Strick only nodded, having heard nothing he had not heard before from this man. “The sklamera never took it off—including in the several hundredth year of her life when she lay with a mortal youth and deceived her father by secretly equipping the lad with gills and becoming his wife. Love, supposedly, true love. The sea-god was outraged and bent on dastardly vengeance, but his daughter persuaded him to forbear. Years passed, and more years, but they were only moments to the beast-god and the demoness. Of course she did not age, while her husband did, and that made him increasingly unhappy. He dealt with his realization of mortality by betraying her, and with a mere mortal woman. Ka’thulu proved so vengeful and so evil as to do horrible death on the human. He made the sklamera watch his agony as he died, far beneath the waves.”
Chance nodded dully. “He sealed the gills she had given the man …”
“Exactly. And then the king-beast of the sea turned on his own daughter, as if she had not been punished enough for having shown a preference for an air-dweller. The spell he cast on her is a particularly nasty one. Without lungs and with her gills sealed, the sklamera can exist only one way—she is forever condemned to imprisonment within the bracer.”
“Ah, gods, Strick! Please don’t tell me that this sklamera is … that it somehow possesses Lone’s beloved!”
Linnana turned her unhappy face away. Strick nodded. “You saw the mark of the sea-demon on Janithe—the rudimentary gills in her neck. Linnana knows the lore better than I do. Linnana?”
She spoke quietly and seemingly without emotion. “An ancient legend among the Beysib is known too to the S’danzo. Throughout the ages a succession of comely young women has been so unfortunate as to draw the attention of the unhappiest of all females, a demon who exists only by inhabiting a bauble of gold. Their name for her is scilarna. This demon bonds herself to the surrogate, and when a moonless sky renders the sea equally black, she is reminded of a long-ago unfaithful love. She takes revenge on the deceitful male sex by choosing a comely young man each night of the moon-dark, and by ripping out of him that which makes him human, and mortal—”
“His lungs,” Chance murmured, staring down at nothing and remembering a long-lost love.
“I need not tell you this is the time of the new moon,” Strick said. “A fresh victim was found this morning. No matter how painful for us and Lone, he has to be warned.”
“There’s more,” Linnana said. “The Watch want him.”
The three exchanged looks of anguish and alarm, and began to plan.
Taran Sayn and the helmeted, cuirassed man of the Watch who accompanied him reached the apartment recently rented to Lone and Janithe, and knocked, and knocked again, and called out. Then Sayn shouted, and the policer leaned spear and shield against the wall and used his fist to pound the door, and shouted, and suddenly Sayn did a silly thing: He reached out and tried the handle.
The door began to swing open.
“If the occupation of this Lone fellow really is what we more than suspect,” Sayn said while the door swung slowly inward, “it’s hard to imagine that he fails to lock up when he leaves his own home! Well, inside, Taganall, and let’s see what we see.”
It hardly seemed necessary for Taganall to draw sword before he entered the darkened apartment, but he did and his companion made no comment. Their search was cursory, since all they sought was a man. They found no one, and no signs of struggle either.
Two blocks away, however, in the direction of that area of town where the four lungless victims had been found, they found a cohort of Taganall’s. The uniformed man’s left arm was still through the first strap of his shield, and his hand still clutched the second, but his sword was fast in its sheath and his spear lay on the pave. Beside it was his body, which had been gorily ripped apart by talons backed by fearsome strength.
“Odd,” Sayn said, ignoring the suddenly bloodless face of his uniformed companion. “His chest hasn’t been torn open. That means he still has his lungs. That tells me he was not tonight’s intended victim, Taganall. He must merely have run afoul of the thing in pursuit of his normal duties.”
“Not normal,” Taganall gasped. “Not normal. Every man in the Watch is on the streets tonight. We’re all going to be exhausted—tomorrow is likely to be remembered as Crime Day!”
He said it accusingly, as if he he
ld the investigator responsible. But Sayn did not respond, for he was a man not without compassion, and Taganall was busy vomiting.
One person awoke to a foreign presence in his apartment on that night without a moon, and another was not asleep, and the cat-burglar called Catwalker was forced to do some running. Up the facade of a building a floor and a half he forced himself as fast as he was able, every second in peril, and all in silence recklessly raced across that roof unlit even by the few visible stars on this night of sky-prowling clouds. His cloth loot-bag hung silently in one hand because it was padded with cotton fluff against the rattle and clink of precious metals and almost by instinct he launched his black-clad self into blackest night to alight on another roof, to smack into an unyielding slab of brick-hard blacker than blackness, and actually bounce off that chimney to fall and roll on the almost flat roof, grunting and gasping but holding back any outcry or curse.
And then he was forced to squint down into pitch blackness and pat the roof with both hands in quest of the bag containing tonight’s gleanings, and was on his feet and running again—dodging a second chimney—and again leaping, flying, soaring through moonless darkness under the faint illumination of a few lonesome stars. At last he fastened the bag to his belt, and double-checked the fastening, and began his downward clamber into the narrow space between this building and the next, which was taller.
He had descended past three rows of windows when he froze at the sudden eruption of clamor immediately below: a male shriek, followed by others as well as howls of pain in the same voice, all accompanied by a ferocious bestial snarling. The perilous “route” Catwalker followed down the side of the building was not one that enabled him to go back up. He stayed frozen, clinging to masonry.
Frozen except for his quivering, clinging desperately to masonry, Lone knew what he was hearing, and he did not want to go down. He listened to ripping sounds. And wet sounds. And then a stomach-lurching wet-ripping noise.
He remained hanging there until his fingers gave out, and spasmed, and he fell backward. By that time below him was only silence.
And hard-packed earth, and garbage.
Fortunately, his fall was for the most part broken by the motionless legs of the latest victim of the sklamera.
This time the superb cat-burglar called Catwalker did not try to examine the corpse. He did not even pause, but rolled off the poor fellow’s legs, grunted with pain as he lurched to his feet, and headed for the faint light he saw. He did not walk.
That rapid pace swiftly brought him out of the passageway between two buildings, and into the light of a torch set atilt in a cresset thrusting out from the building on the corner. His heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest as he glanced in each direction, decided, and started moving rapidly up Tranquility Street. He was at the next corner and in the act of crossing there when the blood-splashed and smeared thing of nightmares seemed just to appear before him, at a distance of some two bodylengths. It snarled in a low voice. It was definitely humanshaped and definitely female, with long stringy hair like seaweed trailing over its shoulders and chest. With feet well apart and arms bent with horribly long claws poised, it stared.
I am dead, Lone thought, filling one hand with nearly three feet of steel and the other with a six-pointed star. He dared not turn his back on this horror to run. He had no choice but to match its stare.
“Lone!” a voice called from behind him, and he jerked spastically at the unexpected sound. “Move aside! You’re between us and it!”
Lone was very aware of that fact, but chose not to say so. It was all he could do not to glance behind him. He thought he recognized the voice, but was not sure. He stared into the eyes of the beast, which was no longer snarling but still drooling blood. Now it cocked its hideous head, and the eyes that stared into his seemed to soften.
Impossible, Lone thought, the hand that held the throwing star slowly rising toward his right ear.
He jerked again in startlement when a spear appeared to the left of his waist, its murderously big head aimed at the beast and carried low for impaling. The smooth round pole was thicker than the thumb of a fat banker and tipped with a full foot of pointed, interestingly recurved steel thick as the wrist of a child. Lone recognized the shape and the markings and was even aware of irony; the thief’s would-be rescuer was a member of the Watch! The spear was moving slowly past him as its wielder advanced, not yet within peripheral vision.
Suddenly the monster uttered a howl beyond fearsome, and charged.
Lone did not have time even to take a swift sideward step, but his arm flashed forward and down. The star of death whizzed on its way, humming—and skipped ringingly along the cobbled street far beyond the spot where the target had been. The sklamera, however, proved not to be charging Lone, but instead to his left. In a seemingly deliberate act of decision, it impaled itself on the leveled spear.
“Uh!” its wielder grunted with impact and effort, while the self-spitted thing of nightmares screamed and writhed and gnashed teeth more horrible than most humans ever saw.
The policer held steady, and twisted his arms and thus the spear, while the sea-beast howled and writhed bloodily on it. And then the hands of the man accompanying the policer enwrapped the far end of the shaft, and savagely rammed it. A freshet of blood burst from the sklamera’s back, swiftly followed by inches of pointed steel. Lone swung his sword high, and back.
“Lone!” a shout rose. “Don’t!”
Recognizing the voice of Linnana, he arrested his motion and turned his head from the dread scene of an impaled monster. He was surprised to see, behind the policer and Taran Sayn, a horse and the little carriage it pulled. Of course; Strick’s home was many blocks from here and he was too fat to walk either fast or far. Four of them had come in quest of Catwalker. the driver Samoff, and Strick, and Linnana, and Chance. Wearing a look of concern deeper than Lone had seen on that face, the master thief was hurrying toward his apprentice.
“Put up the sword, Lone, please!”
Lone glanced at the thing writhing and surely dying on the thick shaft of hardwood that completely transpierced its lower torso, and knew that he could deal the deathstroke. But without a word he sheathed his sword.
There on the street called Tranquility in Sanctuary, Chance stood with a hand on Lone’s shoulder while they watched the beast-daughter of the god Ka’thulu die—again.
“We could not let you cut her, Lone,” Chance said quietly. “You did not slay her and neither did that policer.”
“It—just hurled itself right onto my spear!” a sweaty, red-faced Taganall gasped in wonder.
“It did exactly that, and I know why,” Linnana said, and came too to stand beside Lone and lay an affectionate hand as seven pairs of eyes gazed down at the spasmodically kicking but dead thing on the cobbles. “She just could not bring herself to harm Lone. Oh Lone, we’re all so sorry.”
Lone was just starting to frown in puzzlement when the dead thing began to change. Over the course of a long, long minute, the sklamera resumed the form of the human whose body and mind it had used. Before the change was complete the long golden bracelet became visible, and the very young man who loved her screamed his plaintive, “No-o-oh!”
That shrill cry of wretched youth echoed and re-echoed off buildings on either side of the stricken gathering of heroes, and raced up and down the length of the street called Tranquility.
Protection
Robin Wayne Bailey
The day promised interesting weather. The bright sun had not yet reached zenith over Sanctuary, yet already the air was warm and uncharacteristically humid. The timid zephyr that blew over the harbor failed to dispel the heat or offer any relief. In the south, however, a low bank of dark clouds mustered on the horizon. Dim flickers of lightning at their roiling edges foretold some turbulence.
Regan Vigeles idly tapped a small jewel-hilted dagger against one palm. Shirtless and in only a brief linen kilt and sandals, he noted the coming storm from th
e parapet of the apartment over his shop, then returned his attention to the horizon. His thoughts were on the distant Seaweal and his too-brief journey to the strange wreck that hung impaled. upon the reef out there. Better traveled than most men, he had never seen the vessel’s like before. Yenizedi at a casual glance, to a knowledgeable eye it bore design elements and markings of half a dozen unlikely nations, some of which no longer even existed.
For most of a month since the wreck’s discovery scavengers and treasure-hunters had worked to empty its holds and stripped its decks of anything valuable or useful. Among its diverse inventory they’d found a small cargo of weapons—swords and daggers mostly. More than a few of those had turned up in his shop for sale or appraisal, and they puzzled him even more than the origin of the abandoned wreck. As the owner of the Black Spider, the finest weapon shop in the city, Regan Vigeles knew weapons, their quality, their manufacture, and history.
He stared at the dagger again, the latest weapon from the wreck to come into his possession. It looked brand new, without tarnish, wear, or rust. There wasn’t even an accumulation of grime around the jewel insets. Yet, he recognized its manufacture, the fold of the blade’s metal, and the unusual design of the hilt.
The small blade in his hand was over eight hundred years old.
The dagger and particularly the vessel on the reef were pieces of a puzzle. They represented a mystery in a city where mysteries meant danger. So for a few padpols to a willing fisherman he’d boated out to see the wreck for himself. He still didn’t know quite what to make of his observations or how much information to include in his next dispatch to Jamasharem. But the Rankan emperor was keeping a close eye on Sanctuary these days; he would want to know about this.
