“I’m sorry,” Hanse said. “But I was talking about that scroungy li’l calico. Look at her! She’s putting on a good show of being ready to protect you against him!” He shook his head. “By the Nameless One — I wonder if she likes beer, too!”
“Surely not,” Mignureal said, squatting to rub the smaller cat — which jerked at the touch — while staring into Notable’s huge-pupiled eyes. “She’s a lady.”
“A lady,” Hanse said, “willing to fight for her lady! She’s adopted you, Mignue. You specifically, I mean, the way Notable has me. So! So she’s going to be watch-cat, too. I guess it’s time we named her.”
“Of course it is,” she said, remembering to check the fry-pan. Once again she turned the fish, using the knife he had handed her.
“Mignue…do you think we might call her Moon-flower?”
She shot him a look and her tears came at once. “How could y — my mother…oh how could you?”
Hanse showed surprise and swiftly apologized, but this time he did not dissolve or back down in the face of one of the world’s premiere guilt producers: a woman’s tears.
“How could I?” he echoed. “In respect, and memory of M — ” and his voice broke. He ceased trying to talk at once, and looked away.
“Oh, Hanse,” she said, understanding, blinking and giving him a tender look through her tear-misted eyes.
“Of course we will not, though, since you don’t like it,” he said. He looked at the little animal. “I’d like to call you Moonflower, little ‘draggled kitty, and I’ll bet you’d love it, too. But…I think you name is Rainbow.”
“That’s nice, Hanse! Rainbow! We love you, Rainbow.”
Then all was forgotten but Rainbow, and the eeriness that stole into the glade. The change in the cat was visible in the same way that “watching a baby grow” was possible; it happened, and swiftly, and yet Hanse and Mignue did not quite see movement.
Rainbow changed. The scrawny cat filled out before their eyes; its rumply, apparently undernourished coat took on sheen and became positively sleek. Within a minute the animal appeared to have gained a pound or two — all it could stand without being fat — and to have eaten just the right things to give it sleekly shining fur.
Rainbow also paced over to Notable, and touched noses. Notable sat down.
“Oh gods,” Hanse said in a quavery voice. “Sorcery!”
“Please don’t say ‘I hate sorcery’ again, Hanse. Look at her! Our cat Rainbow obviously likes the name, and her two humans. And Notable.”
A half minute of staring later Hanse jerked out, “Hoy! She probably won’t like that fish though, and neither will we if we don’t get the pan off the fire!”
“Oh!” Mignureal cried, and jerked the pan away from the flames. That resulted in spilling one of the savoury, smoking strips onto the grass. Only the fact that it was very hot indeed prevented her from losing part of their already exiguous dinner to the extremely interested Notable.
“It’s done,” she said, biting her lip a little while Hanse stared at the fish smoking on the grass. “And that grass certainly won’t hurt it.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said, in a distant voice. “I’m thinking about something else. And staring at dinner keeps me from looking at Rainbow.”
Looking at Notable looking at the spilled fish, Rainbow purred.
Mignureal plucked that part of their meal up, from under the big red cat’s nose. “Come on, you. You ate every bit of a fish’s head, eyes and all. Ooh. I wish I hadn’t mentioned that!”
“The thought doesn’t spoil my appetite,” Hanse said, inhaling a big aromatic breath. “My lady, let us dine!”
She laughed. They sat cross-legged on the grass, facing each other and brushing at the occasional intrusion of fly or cat. The fish was good and the better for the long absence of fresh-cooked food from their diet. The fried crawlfish were impossible. Conversation wasn’t much. They exchanged various ideas about the mystery of Rainbow and the eleven coins, but Hanse liked none of diem.
“Ver-ry good,” he said, giving his middle a fond pat, and Mignureal bowed. That was impressive, from her sitting position.
They finished off the slim repast with a few dried dates they had carried all the way from Sanctuary, and when Hanse gave Notable beer in a bowl, he decided to have some too. He tested Rainbow. Rainbow was not at all interested in beer. That was refreshing. Mignureal succumbed to persuasion, blandishment and dares, and tried some.
“Ewwwww.” It was bitter, she pronounced, and that was that. Notable kept right on lapping, while both females played Lady.
“Now it’s time we counted our silver, Mignue, and I’m almost afraid to look in my sash.”
She nodded, hesitated a moment, and commenced producing coins from here and there on her person. Soon Hanse was gusting out a sigh of relief; his unfolded sash housed twenty-nine pieces of silver, the number he had placed there a few hours before. His lack of lettering did not extend to numbers and counting. It had been simple to learn, with the incentive that numbering what one possessed, spent, and received was far more important than reading and writing.
He numbered their coins by arranging them in neat stacks of ten, which he disarranged with a sweep of his hand when he had done. That signalled Mignureal’s turn. She arrived at the same number: their fortune was eighty-nine silver Imperials. Twenty of the coins he counted off into the cracked old saddlebag. Even then he had not done; together they recounted the remainder. Three sets of ten and two of five Mignureal re-secreted on her person. Hanse secreted nine in his underclothing and meticulously refolded his sash around the remaining thirty.
They were well off. In Sanctuary, at least, a good horse might bring six to seven Imperials of silver. Five horses and the worth of twenty or so more, Hanse pointed out, were wealth.
“Anywhere we go, we can live for a long time on what we have,” he told her, “even if we do nothing to bring in more.”
She snuggled. “I am in good hands,” she said, and smiled when one of those good hands slid into her bodice. “But I would not be able not to do anything to bring in more money, Hanse.”
Hanse spent a moment chewing out the meaning of her words, and decided not to argue. “Sundown is not too far away,” he said. “Unless you prefer more riding in the dark, we may as well call this our camp for the night. I can even write ‘HANSE’ a few times in the mud there beside the water.”
“Good!” she said, and hugged him. “This is the perfect opportunity! Let’s take off the rest of our clothes and let me wash them. They’ll be dry by morning.”
Hanse rolled his eyes. “You sure are changing,” he muttered at last.
She smiled happily. “Ohh…don’t embarrass me, darling. We were going to take them off anyhow, weren’t we?”
They awoke hungry and rose with the sun. Mignureal, he saw, was visibly self-conscious until she had put on some clothing. All was unmolested, though it wasn’t all dry. Hanse established that his sash felt the same, and was relieved to discover lots of coins in the saddlebag. Good. Here was an end to his fears of sorcery in the matter of the coinage.
He soon learned that he was wrong, which was worse than dismaying. Something possessed him to count the silver pieces in the bag. Naturally he felt compelled to count them again, gritting his teeth and scowling.
He had been right the first time. Twenty had become twenty-two.
They could not leave until he had laboriously unfolded the scarlet sash and stood by while Mignureal counted its contents. Tvice. She had been right the first time. During the night, thirty had become twenty-nine. She began examining the packets hidden among her clothing. The second bundle she produced and checked was also short one Imperial.
Hanse sat down listlessly, resignedly, with a long sigh and a morose face. He spoke in a dull voice, looking at the ground.
“During the night something transferred one coin from that bundle in your stomacher to the saddlebag, and one from my sash. It isn’t possible, bu
t it happened.”
“There is another possibility,” she said quietly, and he looked up with an expression of hopeful expectancy.
“Let’s hear it!”
“The two coins…transferred…themselves.”
Hanse threw up his hands and made a pained face. “Arrrghhh!”
“I’m sorry,” Mignureal said. “I can’t think of anything else, and I don’t like either one either.”
“A weird cat to begin with, and now an obviously even more; unnatural one,” he said, glancing from Notable to Rainbow, “and even unnatural coins! Gods of my fathers, why can we not be free of things sorcerous! I hate s — ” He broke off and sat staring at the ground between his feet for a long while.
Eventually he rose. “Hate it or not, damn it, I am stuck with it,” he said with a gesture of acceptance, and they began packing the Tejana horse that now served as supply-animal.
“Hanse,” Mignureal said, “sorcery is a fact of life, after all. Think: isn’t my Sight a form of sorcery, of…magic?”
“In a way, but it isn’t the same. It’s a natural unnatural ability, common to one sex of one people: S’danzo women. It isn’t as if a spell is on you. Some sort of spell must be on these cats — certainly Rainbow — and on the coins I welcomed so long ago as ransom!”
“Some of the coins,” Mignureal said significantly. “Consider this, darling. First the bag was full of coins, and the Tejana stole it. Suppose they took out every coin; they would have done, wouldn’t they? Doesn’t that make sense? What doesn’t make sense is for them to have left eleven Imperials of silver in the bag. But when you regained the bag, there were eleven coins in it.”
Chewing his lip, considering, Hanse nodded. “True.”
“Then we took them all out. All of them. And next morning there were eleven coins in the bag.”
Hanse left off checking the lashings of their packs and paused, leaning with one arm on the horse, to stare thoughtfully at her. Again he nodded. “True!”
“So last night that was still the case. We combined all the coins and counted them. You chose to put twenty into the bag.” She paused, looking expectantly at him until he had to nod to get her to continue. “But this morning that had grown to two and twenty.”
“It…happens at night,” Hanse murmured, staring at nothing with narrowed eyes.
She responded with a series of rapid nods. “I was about to say that I’d predict that in one hour or ten hours, those same two-and-twenty coins will still be in that bag.”
She kicked it, which did both her and Hanse a great deal of good. The cheery jungle of twenty-two pieces of silver did not.
“But…eleven seems to be the…” He swallowed before uttering the abhorrent phrase: “…the magic number. Oh! Twenty-two is two elevens, isn’t it!”
“Yes, but I don’t think that’s significant.”
First Hanse seemed to sag a little. Then he crossed his ankles and leaned on the packhorse to stare at her in an attitude of expectant challenge. “Oh you don’t. Why not?”
“Oh now wait, darling, don’t be that way. I’m talking from logic and reason, not the Sight, and I could be totally wrong. Probably am.”
“Uh. You want to give me your logical reasoning theory?” She nodded, and extended her left hand. “First, if we take out all the coins right now, I think the bag will still be empty tonight.” With her other hand she folded down one finger. “Second,” she said, tapping the next finger. “I think there will be eleven coins in the bag tomorrow morning.” She folded that finger down.
“Umm. Is that it?”
“That’s it, Hanse.”
“And what if we leave everything alone?”
“I think — and bear in mind that’s all it is, now — I think that if we leave everything alone that bag will contain two-and-twenty coins tomorrow and the next day too, and…next week.”
Suddenly he clapped a hand to his head, then lurched away from the horse and slapped that hand into the other. “Ah, slow, Hanse, slow! I see! You think that we have eighty-nine coins and eleven of them are — something. Ensorceled,” he said, pronouncing the word as if in pain. “And that nine of the coins we put in the bag happened to be in that group. But we put the other two unnatural pieces on ourselves, in our clothing, and during the night they…travelled to the bag.”
Mignureal nodded. “I’m right, those eleven coins have to be in the bag every morning. It doesn’t matter how many others are, just so these eleven are.”
“Thank the gods Rainbow doesn’t have to be in the bag, too!”
She glanced at the calico cat. “I don’t have any ideas about Rainbow at all.”
“Let’s get out of here and on our way, Mignue. We’ll check the bag tonight, and empty it. We could even try burying those twenty-two, or putting them up a tree or something.” He glanced at the stream. “I’m tempted to throw the whole bag in that deeper pool, right now!”
“That would probably be that,” she said, but then she frowned. “Unless…unless those silver pieces have something to do with us especially.”
I think they have, Hanse mused, but he would not say it. I think that bag was not on that saddle when I put it on the horse! Oh gods, what am I even thinking! No, oh damn it no — gods, O Ils how I hate sorcery!
*
That day Mignureal urged Hanse for the severalth time to put on the Tejana wristlet. Hanse agreed, mostly in order to shut her up about the thing. Since he habitually wore a black leather bracer on his left wrist, he slipped the bracelet onto his right and squeezed it until it was reasonably snug. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. He merely wore the dumb copper circlet, for her.
The sun was at approximate zenith but not demonic on the forest floor beneath tall, tall trees and the forest seeming pushed a bit to remain reasonably cool, when they met the other traveller. While he was still sufficiently distant not to be able to hear quiet voices, Hanse warned Mignureal against using names. It was too bad, but they had to be wary of anyone they met.
The big fellow bestrode a good big dun-coloured horse and led another, which was pack-laden. He was no youngster, Hanse noticed; the lines in his face and around his eyes put him in his thirties or maybe forty. His odd flapped cap, leather left its natural colour, showed no hair. No-one’s more wary and guarded than Hanse, he offered no name. Shadowspawn did not ask.
He did tell them he was heading for Sanctuary.
“Oh,” Hanse said coolly. “I’ve been there. Not a bad town.”
“Not a really good one either, from what I hear,” the other man said, in a quiet and unusually matter-of-fact voice. He was a big ruddy fellow who wore a big ruddy moustache; a rather bushy one of an unusual bronze-brown colour. His tunic was plain homespun, undyed, with an unusually large neck and sleeves short enough to show powerful arms.
“You plan to cross that desert alone?” Mignureal asked in a voice full of incredulity.
He shrugged. “I’ll make it.”
“Beware the Tejana,” Hanse said.
“Heard of them.” The big man shrugged and slapped the handle of a big saddle-sword. He had one sheathed at his hip, too, Hanse noticed. And a shield was slung from his worn old saddle, as well. Round, wooden, bossed with iron. It was of no particular colour and bore no insignia. “I can take care of myself.”
Hanse showed him a grim look. “So can I. A man’s helpless, though, against four levelled crossbow bolts.”
“Oh. A smart man is, aye. Yet you’re leading horses.”
“They robbed us, just the same. Left us the onager and our packs. I followed them. One’s dead and one’s in need of a leg and one’s wounded here and there. Can’t say about the fourth. The onager trampled him.” Hanse jerked a thumb. “Those are — were their horses. This is their leader’s.” He patted the grey’s neck.
The other pilgrim gazed at him from strangely blue eyes. “You are a dangerous man.”
Hanse didn’t say anything.
“See anything in the woods?”
> Hanse shook his head. “Birds. Cats scared up a snake and played with it awhile, this morning. It didn’t look poisonous to me. You’ll hear the water in a few hours, and see the path. We recommend the place. Camped there last night.”
The other man nodded. “Four of them, hmmm?”
Hanse blinked at the transition. “Four men, four crossbows, three horses. And a camp that’s at least semi-permanent; they had rigged an enclosure for their horses. Very bad men, but I never planned to kill anyone.”
The other man nodded. “Killing’s not your business?”
“No,” Hanse said, and did not ask the next question. “We’re headed for — what’s the name of that town?”
“Firaqa’s about two days on north.”
“That’s it,” Hanse said, nodding as if in recognition of the name and looking as if he were considering a smile. He didn’t want to smile in delight that he had obtained information by the little trick. He’d never heard of Firaqa.
“You’ll be out of the forest before sunset,” the other man said, glancing up. “Just follow the road beyond. Oh — I met some mighty nice farm folk yesterday. Hospitable people. Red and yellow house — was yellow, I mean. Yellow dog and several cats. They’re nice people, with a good well. He’s Imrys.”
Mignureal sensed a lessening of wary terseness and at least a tendency toward friendly exchange. “You sure you have enough water for the desert?”
The other pilgrim glanced at her and looked again at Hanse. “You mentioned water ahead.”
“Good clear stream. Even has some fish in it.”
The other man nodded. “I’ll have plenty of water,” he told Mignureal, and looked back at Hanse. “You throw, don’t you?”
“What?”
‘Wearing throwing knives. Left-handed and good with throwing knives.”
It was not a question, but it did tread on the border of personal business, into which they had avoided crossing. Hanse said nothing.
“Sorry,” the big man said. “An observation. Not trying to pry. Wishing you were going my way.”
Shadowspawn (Thieves' World Book 4) Page 10
