Stealers' Sky tw-12

by Robert Asprin

  And Marype who was Markmor screamed, a high-pitched wail that diminished rapidly-as he did. Marype was gone, dead; Markmor occupied that body while his own soul reposed in the body of the vole. The vole was eaten. Marype's body was neither occupied nor alive. It began to deteriorate, hurrying to catch up to several weeks' delayed putrescence.

  The sight was ugly, horripilating; the stench was beyond horrible.

  "Gahh!" Shadowspawn grabbed his nose with thumb and curled forefinger hard enough to hurt. "Notable! Out of here! Gahh!"

  And he fled, a huge red demonic thing racing after him as if in chase, trailing a straight-out tail like a red bristle-brush. They raced through the house and down to the concealed entry to the old tunnel and along it, and neither stopped running until they were re-entering the Lily Garden.

  While he was freeing Amoli of gag, blindfold, and bonds Hanse told her of the horror he and Notable had just fled. "Marype just ... just ..."

  "That was not Marype," she managed to say, having worked up a little moisture in her dry, dry mouth and licked her lips many times. "Marype is dead. He was stupid enough to bring back Markmor, and Markmor rewarded him by murdering him. Your cat killed Markmor and you watched what happens to a dead man weeks after he died. And I'll tell you, Hanse, Shadowspawn, thief and mage-killer and probably hero too -you've done me a favor tonight. I've got a hundred imperials and my life and I am very, very glad to get out of this town!"

  And she went.

  Next day Hanse, undisguised, visited Strick to advise that he had found the perfect disguise and a fine business venture for Taya. Strick did what he could and sent her to Ahdio for a more permanent spell. She emerged still shapely and still attractive, but no longer Taya, former prince's playmate. She was Altaya, proprietor and Strick's partner in ownership of the Lily Garden.

  That afternoon two men in Strick blue delivered to the palace the jingly contents of Amoli's and MarkmorIMarype's chest, to be used in the continuing reconstruction of the city. "To make it Sanctuary's work for Sanctuary," the message signed by Strick and by Hanse read, "independent of Ranke."

  Hanse was meanwhile presenting the father of Mignureal and Jileel with a bag containing fine and far too valuable pearls which he had not stolen. He strongly suggested that Teretaff cause the pearls to be made into ear-drops for his several daughters, and "bury the rest under the floor or someplace."

  He left without TeretafTs knowing of the sack of gold pieces Hanse had secreted in his shop-home, for safekeeping.

  A few hours later in the Vulgar Unicorn, Hanse slipped a lot of golden imperials to the serving girl Silky, and bought drinks for the house until the Vulg grew so boisterously noisy he couldn't stand it, after which he ambled around to Sly's Place. There he bought drinks for the house, but left when the place grew so noisy he couldn't stand it. He went home with a large bucket of beer and enjoyed watching Notable get thoroughly drunk. Watching a cat stagger was more fun than Hanse could remember.

  A week later he traded with Cholly the gluemaker for a dagger he recognized: a handsome affair. True, its hilt was marred, but who could resist that nice silver-inlaid blade?

  THE INCOMPETENT AUDIENCE by Jon DeCles

  ACT ONE

  "I don't care if he is the new Emperor's cousin!" cried Feltheryn the Thespian, brandishing a paper broadside that he had just ripped off a wall before its glue could dry. "If Emperor Theron liked him he wouldn't be in Sanctuary!"

  "My darling," said Glisselrand, her fingers flying amidst many-colored yams, "there is a difference between not liking one's relatives and wishing them harm. Remember that Emperor Abakithis sent our darling Kitty-Kat here to Sanctuary, presumably because he thought him a threat. Nobody has any doubt that Abakithis wanted Kitty-Kat out of the way, but neither does anybody doubt that he would have dealt severely with anyone who spilled the royal blood."

  "I wasn't suggesting that we murder Vomistritus," said Feltheryn, frustrated by his lady's calmness.

  Glisselrand laughed.

  "If not, my pet, then he is the first critic ever to escape that suggestion after giving you that kind of review!"

  (Yes, it was true! The very vilest villain of all had slunk into Sanctuary, a creature so reprehensible as to make all previous contenders-with the possible exception of Roxane-pale. It had been written-long before the fall of Ranke, long before the fall of Ilsig, long before the first settlers had put down roots at the confluence of the Red Foal and the White Foal rivers-that the appearance of criticism portended the first sign of maturity in an art form. But for his part, Feltheryn rather thought that the appearance of critics was the first signal of total social decay, a sign that people had lost control of their own minds and tastes and had therefore to resort to the opinions of others.)

  "And rightly so!" Feltheryn growled. He then waxed pedantic: "A critic is one who espouses the idea that one must divorce one's self from emotional involvement in a work of art in order to apply unchanging standards to all such works and thus render a judgment on the individual work based on a reasoned measurement made against those standards. Yet a work of art, by definition, is a thing which directly engages the emotions, carrying feeling through what is only, really, a cold construct: a channel by which the heart of a perhaps long-dead artist may touch the heart of a living perceptor!"

  Glisselrand looked up at him from her knitting, today a series of small orange, purple, and red squares which would later be assembled into a folksy quilt that would even later give someone a headache. She raised one elegant eyebrow in question, prompting him to continue-

  (There had been a point, perhaps thirty years earlier in their romance, when he wondered if, at such times, she really understood what he was saying, really cared; or if she was just humoring him. It no longer mattered to him, for the essence of the situation was that she wanted him to continue, and he wanted to continue, and, after all, it wasn't going to change anything.)

  He took a deep breath and delivered his conclusion: "That of course means that a critic is someone who is congenitaHy incapable of appreciating art!"

  Glisselrand stopped knitting for a moment and considered his thesis. Then she smiled and her fingers once again flew, gnarled but fast.

  "Now that you mention it," she said, "it did seem that way in Ranke. They spoke a great deal about form and structure and style, but I am not sure I ever met a single critic who I felt really understood what he was talking about. Flash without fire, as the poet says. But looking back at our years in Ranke, I do believe we can be grateful that Sanctuary has only one critic, even if he is an especially bad one, and even if he is the Emperor's cousin."

  Feitheryn growled again and Glisselrand wondered if perhaps he was thinking of producing The Cowslip Flower, a play in which he was magically transformed into a camel.

  "With all the faults this town has," Feltheryn continued, "with all the horrors it has endured, yet the old adage about Sanctuary has proved untrue. It was not. after all, the one place you could find the worst of anything. Stinking Sanctuary could still hold high its head on that one point, and I think it could have got along just fine without ever having acquired a damned critic of its own!"

  "Well, my dear," said Glisselrand, "I quite agree with that. I just wonder that the people of Sanctuary have fallen for it."

  "It's the economics of the thing, of course!" Feltheryn continued to rave. "It's not cheap to come to the theater, because producing theater costs so much, even with the generous patronage we've got here. That's all the opening a vulture like Vomistritus needs' A little clever writing, a wicked turn of phrase, he hires a couple of scribes who can copy neatly if not well, pastes these broadsides all over town to gain an audience, and then the people will spend a copper to read what he has to say before they spend their soldats to come see the play. And the most insidious thing about it is the smug satisfaction of those who have never been to see one of our performances, yet who feel competent to discuss them!"

  "How long have the broadsides been up?" G
lisselrand asked, stopping her work once again and fixing Feltheryn with a look not unlike the one she gave the crooked bailiff in the great trial scene of The Merchant's Price.

  "Well, the paste was still wet when I pulled this one down," said Feltheryn. "It cannot be too long."

  "Very good!" said Glisselrand. "Then we shall set Lempchin to running around town today pulling them all down. Better still, we shall give him a chance to practice his performance (he wants so much to go on stage!) by going in disguise, and thereby not making it obvious that we are the ones responsible. Unless Vomistritus is very well off, he won't be able to have his scribes keep making copies as fast as we can take them down. Perhaps he will get tired of being a critic and find some other way to annoy people!"

  Lempchin was called, Glisselrand cozened the chubby boy neatly into disguising himself in the interests of the theater troupe's welfare, and Feltheryn was shortly back to preparing the script for The Chambermaid's Wedding, the next play the company was to produce.

  Their current production, The Falling Star, was doing well enough, but Feltheryn was not fond of playing the villain and Glisselrand was waking each morning after the performance with aches and pains brought on by the finale, that desperate scene in which the actress who was the "star" of the title hurled herself from the castle walls rather than face the charge of murder against her from Act Two.

  Of course as the villain Feltheryn got that wonderful scene in the second act in which he soliloquized about the joys of lust: and the scene that followed was not without satisfaction as he got to order the torture (horrible, but off stage) of Snegelringe, who would soon deserve torture if he didn't stay out of the bedchambers of some of Sanctuary's better class of bored ladies. Rounsnouf, the company comedian, got to play the torturer and he was quite good at it; although one had to keep an iron hand on his performance or he would chew the scenery to such a degree that the audience would begin to laugh, and that was unforgivable in a play of such passion and violence.

  It was a good play, no doubt about that! But Feltheryn would have preferred to delay his own murder to the last act. As it was, he lay dead in a puddle of pig's blood at the end of the second act, and there was naught for him to do for a full third of the play but sit backstage in his costume and makeup waiting to take a bow at the end. And he had a sneaking suspicion that the applause he got would have been considerably greater if the audience had not had time to forget how good he was when Glisselrand plunged the knife from the supper table into his throat.

  But enough of that! It was time the company took on a comedy, and The Chambermaid's Wedding was probably the best comedy ever written. Tragedy was all very fine, and it inevitably drew a crowd, but Sanctuary was a town with plenty of tragedy of its own; Sanctuary could use a few laughs, and Feltheryn intended to provide them.

  There was only one small difficulty, and that was the lack, in the troupe, of a third-string female. Glisselrand would of course play the Countess, and Evenita the title role of the Chambermaid. But there was Serafina, the Schoolgirl, to cast as well, and one needed a strong actress for that because there were a great many lines, a song, and most of the time on stage the school was disguised as a schoolboy. That was because she had a schoolgirl crush on the Countess and, in an innocent schoolgirl way, wanted the Countess to make love to her.

  They had tried doing the play with a boy in the part and it had proved a disaster. That was before Lempchin had joined the company. If they were forced to use Lempchin it would be worse than a disaster! Besides which, audiences loved to see a pretty young girl dressed up in tight pants pretending to be a boy. It was traditional, and even a bit erotic.

  No, Feltheryn sighed to himself as he sat at the kitchen table looking at the script; they would have to find another female, that was all there was to it. And the best place to look for women was in the Street of Red Lanterns, at the Aphrodisia House. Myrtis had helped them before, she might be able to help them again.

  He went upstairs to where Glisselrand was preparing for an afternoon nap, explained carefully what he had in mind, and got her blessing. Whatever else might be thought of The Chambermaid's Wedding, it was the one play in which all the sympathy and love went to the older woman, not to the younger title role; and Glisselrand was of an age to appreciate that-

  Feltheryn would of course play the Count, who was also in a way a villain; but at least he would be on stage right up to the final curtain.

  His trip to the Aphrodisia House was despoiled only by the presence of the offending broadsides distributed by Vomistritus. Apparently Lempchin had not yet got to the Street of Red Lanterns. Feltheryn pulled a few down as he passed them, but the glue was beginning to dry and it was difficult to get it off his hands once it was on. He had to beg pardon at the door when he finally arrived and ask for a basin and then, as the glue was much tackier than he had thought, he had to ask for help from one of the ladies of the house.

  Feltheryn was not beyond appreciating the charms of the lovely young woman who helped him, nor was he in the least insensitive to the finetuned professionalism of her performance, displayed in even so humble an activity as helping him get his hands clean. The world's oldest profession was at least eighty percent theater, he recalled from his wild and reckless youth. Any woman could offer sex for money, but it took talent to make that sex so desirable that the audience returned again and again for the show.

  And it was a show: the act itself was only the last curtain of an evening compounded of beautiful costumes, exotic perfumes, graceful movement, tantalizing conversation, stimulating music, and a setting that was a marvel of womanly design. To visit the Aphrodisia House was to enjoy a show with only one plot but a constantly changing cast of characters: and it was that fact which made the difference between Myrtis's elegant courtesans and the sad and desperate women who walked by night in the Promise of Heaven.

  "There now!" said the young woman, drying his hands with an embroidered towel. "We've got it all off, Master Feltheryn. I'll clean up this mess, and you can go talk with the madam. Do you know the way to her room?"

  "No, I am afraid I have not had that pleasure," Feltheryn answered in his most courtly fashion as he stood from the little table.

  "Then I'll have one of the girls show you," she said, beginning quickly to clean as she had said she would. "Shawme! Shawme, would you please show Master Feltheryn up to Myrtis's room? I sent word up to her that he was here."

  Shawme, a mere child whose blue eyes held inordinate pride, smiled at Feltheryn and led him up the stairs. A moment later he was seated in a small parlour, explaining his needs to Myrtis, the proprietrix of the Aphrodisia House, and sipping the blackberry tea she provided.

  "-so you see, lovely lady," he finished, "she must be talented and willing to leam to act if she cannot, and reasonably beautiful, but she must also have the sort of figure which lends itself to wearing men's clothing. For most of the play she must be disguised as a man, and it must not appear laughable that she is so disguised. The audience will suspend its disbelief to see a young girl in tight pants, but it will not accept a full-blown womanly figure in the same outfit. I very much want to do the play, but without your help I fear I cannot."

  Myrtis laughed-

  "My dear Feltheryn! The fact is, there are plenty of people running around this town in the clothes of the opposite sex, and most of them are women. For some strange reason they assume cross-dressing to be the one way in the world they can protect their precious chastity. Not that I am in any wise tolerant of any man abusing a woman, mind you, but really, there are so many other and better ways of preventing rape! Why, you will never find a softer, more engagingly femimne roster of ladies than reside within my walls; but any one of them could tell you a dozen ways to keep a man in place if he tried to take something that wasn't his. Yet it is not the lovely, soft, delicate ones who worry, and who sometimes should. It is those hard, intolerant women: the ones with some kind of chip on their shoulder. They never in their lives have tried to ma
ke themselves attractive to men, yet they assume they are irresistible to anything on three legs. Ha! They should try working here, coaxing some poor merchant to arousal who is more worried about whether the money is well spent than whether he is having a good time! But beyond that, these women have gone to extremes to make themselves less than attractive to men, have often learned some devastating martial an in response to their fear, and they have acquired manners that would get them barred from my house if they were men; and still, they go through life assuming that rape is around every corner! So they disguise themselves as men, and spend most of their life energy worrying about whether they will be found out. It saddens me deeply, A woman should live her life going forward at full charge, not cringing back in fear of something that may never happen."

  "But Myrtis," said Feltheryn, "some women do get raped."

  "Well of course they do!" said the madam- "And some get murdered and some get robbed and some get tortured and a great many are beaten by their husbands in the cozy confines of respectable marriage. By far the greatest number of women die in childbirth! But life is about living. Master Player, not about the piddling little moment at the end when you die. Oh, some of these fearful women are dear friends of mine, and I try to understand. But it does seem foolish to put such a high value on rape when a woman in this town is far more likely to be robbed or murdered. What a rapist seeks to take he really cannot, unless the woman lets him; and that is not her body, but her dignity. She may not like the physical part, it may sit with her like a canker for her lifetime if she lets it; but frankly, nobody can use my body to humiliate me. I am flesh, but I am more than that. I am a woman, and inordinately proud of the fact, and neither pain nor humiliation can touch that. Besides, men get raped too, so it's not much of a disguise in the long run. In fact, in Sanctuary, disguising yourself as a goat wouldn't be much better!"