"Look at you. Bravest cat in the world with the real thing, and afraid of a little st-"
The staff shimmered, its wriggly carving seeming to wriggle in reality. Then, while a few hundred ants played footrace up Hanse's back, the staff moved. It glided along the floor, and up onto the bed, and to the far end, and into a nice dark sheltering place: under the Beysa's figured silk bedspread.
"I've got to get out of this damned town," Hanse muttered in a voice wavery as the sand-viper, and went out the window. He had to drag himself back up that fulvistone wall on one silken rope so that he could go down another-all the way across the palace grounds and wall and the Processional to where Kama and company would have made the arrow-end of the line fast.
Notable passed him on the way to the roof. Hanse gave him a glare, wishing he could go up walls that way. Maybe with the talons the Stare-Eyes slid onto their fmgers when they ate...
He was up and on his belly, pulling himself up between two merlons of that toothily crenelated defense-wall around the roof, when he heard the voice. The accent was neither Rankan nor Ilsigi.
"So. A rotten little thief tries to invade us, does he? Well, Ilsiger slime, this is your last climb!"
And Hanse heard the sound of the guard's sword clearing its scabbard on his back, doubtless to come down on Shadowspawn's neck. Or wrists, or forearms; it didn't matter. He was helpless and absolutely vulnerable, on his stomach and clutching with both hands while his legs dangled.
That was when he was startled so that he nearly let go and fell, for his ears were assaulted by the loudest and most terrible yowling screech he had ever heard in his life. Wincing, scrabbling desperately, Hanse twisted his neck to look up-He saw the Beysib guard all astagger, shocked by that ghastly sound; and he saw the red streak that was Notable on the pounce. The cat began eating holes in the Stare-Eye's arm and the poor worse-than-disconcerted idiot forgot what he was about and struck at the cat with his sword. That cost him not just the pain as he struck his own arm, but his balance. With only a grunt he went right over Hanse and through the crenelation and down a hundred feet and more to a messy splat of an end.
Mignureal did it again, Hanse thought, wriggling onto the roof in double-time. She knew, and Notable just saved my life. Twice, probably. But he also went down with the Stare-Eye... how'II I ever explain to Ahdio? Then he was on his feet, ready to seize the taut rope stretching down and out and down, and the cat on the nearer merlon said "mrowr?"
Hanse could not control his chuckle. "I like you, cat! Want to hop on and ride me down? Careful now-you sink a claw into my shoulder and I'll tell Ahdio you're soft on mice!"
They went down.
The snake from the Beysa's apartment would be useful-it and its venom and a few physicians working away in quest of an antitoxin. As for the Beysa, the sand viper in her bed had doubtless given her a lot of fun. As for the Ti-Beysa crown-the PFLS was made. Amid all the yammering chatter of PFLS voices, Hanse sort of faded into the shadows, fleeing all the praise and overblown encomiums. He was sure that there was no way the word was not going to get out. The theft and the blow against the invaders were enormous accomplishments. Someone would tell: Shadowspawn did it.
I've got to get out of this dam' town!
Mignureal went up the long, long hill with him, she leading the ass and he the horse.
"I've got to leave town," he had told her. "Maybe... maybe forever. You're coming with me, right?"
She stared at him for a long while, until at last she nodded. "Right."
Up at Eaglebeak, they tethered the two animals to fallen chunks of fine building stone and Hanse went to the old well. If only I hadn't dropped all that coin down here, he thought. This is going to be a job among jobs. Gods, but I wish I had it out already!
Since by choice he remembered only that he was Hanse, son of a barely-known mother and the never-seen father who had been only her casual acquaintance, he knew nothing about previous wishes. He was mightily surprised when the two laden, leathern saddlebags came floating, noisily dripping, up to his waiting hands.
Zip and Jing and a lot of others were mightily surprised, a little over an hour later, when a big leather bag came flying down, seemingly from the sky. It struck the hard-packed earth of a Downwinder "street" with an enormous • crashing jingling noise... followed by a lot of little jingles as a flashing clinking rolling skittering mass of good minted silver splashed out.
"For Sanctuary," a voice called from above, and it was not the voice of Ils or even Shalpa, but of a thief on a rooftop. Getting that bag up there had been a lot of work, but it was worth it for the effect: "Shadows can go anywhere, into palaces and even into the hallowed and guarded precincts of Zip!"
"Hanse! You've just been elected second-in-command and Master Tactician! Come down, man!"
They waited a long time.
Much, much later than that, an aide ushered a sentry into the tent of their leader.
"Your pardon. General. Go ahead, Pheres."
"Sir, there's a man and a woman, both mighty young out here. Wrigglies. I mean Ilsigi, sir. On a horse and an ass. With a lot of silver coin in an old cracked leather bag- a big one. Threw back his white robe and hood to show me he's dressed all in black. Said he's a friend of yours? From Sanctuary? Right out of the shadows, he says. Sir."
The general stared, then smiled and rose from his camp-table to stride past the two men and out of the tent. "Hanse!" Tempus called.
[i] Detailed in "Shadowspawn," in Thieves' World, 1979
[ii] For a detailed description of Hanse's entry into the upper precincts of the palace, see "The Vivisectionist" in the third Thieves' World volume. Shallows of Sanctuary. No better way in has been found, although having help is nice.
GYSKOURAS by Lynn Abbey
Illyra needed no special S'danzo power to read the young man's past. He had been, and still was, a sewer-snipe. His face was marred by neglect and disease. He watched her, and her scrying table, with the desperate intensity of one who had been beaten, betrayed, yet still hoped for victory. She stood beside her table to stare him out of her shop, when he tossed an ancient, filthy golden coin onto the gray baize beside her.
"I need to know. They said you would know, one way or the other." His surprisingly deep voice made the simple phrases into an accusation.
"Sometimes," she replied, listening to the steady pounding of Dubro's hammer, her fingers poised over the coin.
They came to her in greater numbers now that Moon-flower was dead and her daughter had run away with the thief, Shadowspawn. Illyra could not think of the immense woman who had defended her right to be S'danzo in Sanctuary without feeling a storm of grief as immense as the old woman herself. She wanted to tie a knot across her doorway, turn her back to the Sight, and give way to her grief, but they came with their coins and demanded and she did not know how to turn them away. Dubro helped, intimidating the ones he sensed danger in, but he had let this one through. Her forefinger brushed the gold. "If the answer can be known, sometimes I can know it." Gathering her skirts over one arm, she settled behind the table and gestured for him to sit on the stool. The gold was still on the baize and the silk was still tied around her cards when he began his story.
"I killed a pig last night. By the White Foal-for luck. I need lots of luck."
Illyra felt the first lies drift between them. Sanctuary was swollen with Beysib stomachs and Ranke, tearing itself apart with wars and assassinations, was a fading presence in this comer of its once-great Empire. Even sewer-snipes should know enough to sell a pig for Beysib gold and use the gold to buy luck.
"I-I took the blood to a place, a special place. It's mine, and Vashanka's. I gave Him the blood."
She set the cards aside and suppressed a 'shiver. Unlike many S'danzo women sitting in their rooms throughout the Empire, Illyra did have the Sight. An un Sighted S'danzo woman survived by listening to her clients without laughing; she used the cards for mystery. Illyra used the cards for inspiration and guidance when the Si
ght came to her; she had no need for inspiration as this youth unburdened himself.
"It was like a wind. It was hot and cold; wet and dry all at once."
"Then it could not have been a wind," she told him, though she Saw the truth of his memories swirling around her. It was not like her Sight to be. out of her control this way; she sought to rein it in.
"It was a wind. And the blood-the blood was covered with sparks.
She Saw the secret place in his mind: an altar abandoned to the marshes and discovered by the snipe who prayed there without knowing what it was or had been. Blood sacrifices made on its mossy stones-not pig's blood but men's blood: Beysib blood and bits of flesh he'd hacked from their corpses as offerings in his own private worship. Illyra felt the unholy wind whip around him while the rest of the marsh froze motionless and saw the blue-white flames dance on the blood. She heard the shrill giggle of a child's laughter as the congealed mess on the altar was absorbed into the flame; then the Sight was gone and there was only the ragged, scared youth-who called himself Zip and tried to hide his true name even from himself-staring at her.
"So, what do you see. Did the Stormgod hear me? Does Vashanka favor me? Can I bind Him to me? Sell me a potion to bind the Stormgod!"
She meant to send him away. The S'danzo had no use for gods and were happiest when the gods had nothing to do with the S'danzo. It didn't matter that she could answer his questions. He had focused her Sight on the god and she wanted him, and all that was in his memories, gone before ('(noticed her. Yet she could still hear the laughter and didn't that mean, answer him or not, that the damage was already done?
The youth mistook her hesitation for imminent betrayal. "Don't give me suvesh talk." He reached across the table to grip her wrist.
"See the priests if you want to talk to the Stormgod," she replied icily, extracting herself with a swift, small movement he had never seen, or felt, before. But for the blacksmith, whose hammer rang in the sunlight beyond her shop, she'd have been a sewer-snipe herself. She knew his type of brazen pride and knew, as he did himself, that any whim of fate could squash him, without warning. He had stumbled into something vaster and more dangerous than he had ever imagined. As much as he lusted after the excitement and glory, he feared it.
"What do the priests know?" he said, as if any priest would have spoken to him. "Nosing up to the snakes. They don't know anything about Vashanka."
"If you know so much more than the priests, you certainly know more than a S'danzo fortune-teller." She pushed the gold coin back to him.
"A half-S'danzo fortune-teller who knew when that damned fleet would arrive could talk to Vashanka if she dared." He ignored the coin and met her stare.
Anything that survived in the gutter of Sanctuary was dangerous. Zip had already violated her home with his visions; would he be any more dangerous with the truth about his prayers, sacrifices, and altar-or any the less?
"Keep your gold and everything else. Vashanka is no more."
He sat back as if she'd struck him. Surely he'd heard the rumors, lived through the storm that saw Vashanka's name struck from the pantheon archstones? Perhaps he hadn't quite believed that the Rankan Stormgod had been vanquished in the skies over Sanctuary, but he should have learned to contain his horror if he expected to survive.
"I give Him blood at my altar... and He takes it!"
"Fool! Leave the gods to the priests. You find a pile of rotting stones in the mud by the White Foal and you think you can lure Vashanka to your cause. Vashanka! The Storm-god of Ranke-and with the blood of a pig!"
"He hears me! I feel Him but I can't hear Him! He's telling me something and I can't hear him!"
"You don't want to know what hears you. Could Ranke have built a temple to Vashanka, lost it to the White Foal, and all Sanctuary forgotten it was there except for you?" She was standing, leaning over her table, screaming in his face and unmindful of everything except the laughter he'd left in her mind. She couldn't See what he had raised yet, but it was getting clearer the longer he sat there with his sacrifices and memories battering against her.
"Get out of here! Vashanka does not hear you. No god yet born hears you! Nothing hears you! May the dung rise up and swallow you before anything listens to you again!"
She did not believe the S'danzo had the power to curse, but the sewer-snipe did. Zip backed up until the sunlight from the doorway fell around his feet, then he turned and ran, not noticing, or perhaps not caring, that he had left his gold coin behind.
" 'Lyra! What happened?" Dubro called to her from the doorway. He took a step to follow the youth, then turned back and rushed to catch Illyra before she collapsed over her table. He carried her in his arms like a sick child, berating himself for not sensing the danger in the young man, while she whispered broken phrases in the ancient S'danzo language.
The rat-faced sewer-snipe had forced her to See what should not be Seen and what she should not dare to remember. Each breath and heartbeat solidified the images and knowledge. Illyra worked frantically to blind herself to what had happened, before it spread like poison through wine and condemned her as surely as it had condemned the young man. She bound the knowledge in the form of one of the great black carrion-birds that flocked above the Char-nel House and, with a wrenching sob, set it free.
"'Lyra, what's wrong?" her husband asked, stroking her hair and swabbing her tears with the comer of his sweaty tunic.
"I don't know," she answered honestly. A shimmering blackness of her own devising hung in her memories. The fear remained, and a sense of doom, but the vision itself had been seared away; the sound of a child crying was all that remained. "The children," she whispered.
Dubro left his forge in the care of his new, anxious apprentice and followed Illyra through the Bazaar to the Street of Red Lanterns. Children were an inevitable byproduct of life on the Street, and even if most of them wound up in the gutters, a few of them enjoyed a healthy, sheltered childhood within the Houses themselves. Myrtis, madam of the fortresslike Aphrodisia House, kept the boys as well as the girls, and had apprenticed one youth to Dubro in exchange for sheltering the couple's twin son and daughter.
The Street was quiet and drab in the afternoon sunlight. Illyra let go of Dubro's hand and told herself that there was no danger, that the blackness in her mind was a nightmare she could release and forget. She thought nothing of the young woman running toward them until she fell to her knees before them. '
"Shipri be praised, you're right here! He was sleeping with the rest-"
The woman's hysteria rekindled Illyra's anxiety and her Sight. She Saw the room where Myrtis, frowning, leaned over a cradle; where chubby blonde Lillis cowered in a shadowed comer; and where her year-and-a-half-old son had stopped crying. Following the certainty of her vision she raced ahead down stairways and corridors.
"You've come so quickly," the ageless madam said, looking up from the cradle, a momentary wrinkle of confusion on her brow. "Ah, but yes, you do have the Sight, don't you?" The confusion vanished. "You know as much as I, then." She made room for the child's mother at the cradle.
The little boy lay rigid in some sudden, paralyzing fever. His breath came in sporadic gasps, each holding the possibility that there would be no others. His tears were drying on his dirty cheeks. Illyra brushed her fingers across one rivulet and shivered when she saw that the darkness was in the tears themselves.
"It is like no disease I know of," Myrtis disclaimed. "I would send word to Lythande, but the Blue Star is beyond my call now. We can summon Stulwig or some other-"
"There's no need," Illyra said wearily.
She was seeing everything twice: once with her own eyes and mind, then a second time with the Sight. The strange-ness should have been overwhelming, but because the Sight itself was involved, there could be no surprises. Dubro pushed aside the curtain and joined them. She glanced at him and Saw the completeness of his being: his boyhood, his manhood, his death-and quickly lowered her eyes. Again she made a raven of Vision an
d set the knowledge free, but the new darkness it left within her was insignificant compared to the old.
Because she would only look at her shallow-breathing son whose shape and fate was the same in both visions, Illyra was left alone with him. She sat on the rocking stool and felt the square of window-light move across her shoulders, then the first chill of twilight. They brought her a thin broth, which she ignored, and wrapped a heavier shawl around herself as the night air thickened. She moved as little as Alton did in her arms.
A fresh wind carried the weather through Sanctuary: an almost silent storm of thin clouds passing swiftly before the moon. It was midnight, perhaps, or somewhat later, when a moon-cast shadow broke free and came to rest on the headboard of the cradle. Illyra bowed her head and allowed the raven to return. Sight decayed and reformed without darkness. She Saw Zip's face, his benighted altar, and the mark of a Stormgod in her son's cloudy tears.
She did not know yet how to save Arton, though Sight and sight were the same now and a path of silver-edged importance was emerging where there had been only blackness. Her plan was still unformed when she drew the borrowed shawl tightly around herself and went, unseen and without light, through the back passages of the Aphrodisia.
It was well past midnight, for the Street had become quiet and the moon had set. Fog crept up from the harbor, emphasizing the silence, the darkness, and the dangers. Illyra, who disliked the city and traveled its streets as seldom as possible, walked confidently toward the garrison barracks where her half-brother was in command of the guard. In the back of her mind she recalled all the gossip of the Bazaar: how Sanctuary was more dangerous than ever now that so many gangs, mercenaries, and soldiers were taking an interest in it. She recalled as well that no S'danzo had ever used the Sight as she was using it to walk the streets in utter darkness, utterly alone and utterly safe. She could have distrusted its unfolding powers, conceived as they were as her son lay touched by some unknowable Stormgod, but, flush with the confidence of the Sight itself, she dismissed her thoughts and stepped deftly around the silver-traced offal.
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