Thieves' World: Turning Points

by Lynn Abbey

  Dysan watched the women preen and dress for bed. The girls among the orphans had taught him propriety by slapping or kicking him when he dared to peek at them unclothed. The more jaded ones either did not care or might charge him in a murderous rage. It became vitally important to discern which and, after his brother had rescued him twice, easier not to look at any of them in a vulnerable state. Dysan had finally grown old enough to find women more than just a curiosity, but his body had not caught up to his mind and probably never would. He had long ago resigned himself to the permanent height of a seven-year-old but found himself wistful again as he passed into the second half of his teens. He doubted any Woman would ever take him seriously as a partner, not even the girls in the Unicorn; and anyway, the idea of paying for it reminded him too much of his mother.

  At length, all the women, except SaParnith, settled in for the flight. She kept herself busy throwing an occasional log on the fire, staring out at the stars, and laboring over a knot of rope work in her lap. Dysan had no trouble sneaking down from his loft to the outside, then creeping soundlessly behind SaParnith. He distinguished the breathing of each woman, four naturally and blissfully asleep and one calmly awake. Cautiously, he dipped the end of SaParnith's bedroll into the fire. She took no notice of him either when he slipped away, clambered back into position, and watched the results through a space in the ceiling timbers.

  The cloth took longer than he expected to ignite. Gradually, wisps of smoke condensed into a billow. He watched long enough to see a flame appear amidst the smoke. Smiling, he settled back into position, with every intention of observing the drama unfolding beneath him. Then, exhaustion ambushed Dysan, claiming watchfulness and consciousness alike.

  Only then did Dysan dare to squirm from his hiding place. Those flames had roared to life with a suddenness that caught him wholly off-guard. Smoke funneled into his lungs like a living thing, solid and suffocating. He ran for the nearest exit, dragging Kharmael into a wild column of flame consuming the doorway, searing his face, wringing tears from his eyes only to dry them with heat an instant later. Gasping like a beached fish, he sprinted blindly back the way he had come, losing his grip on his brother.

  Kharmael! Dysan tried to shout, but the flames burned his lungs, and his throat felt as raw as cinders. He took a step forward, trip-ping over something solid. Kharmael? He reached for the body, blistering his hands on blazing linen. He jerked backward, sobbing, trying to find bearings that the now impenetrable smoke would not allow. His mind grew desperately fuzzy. He ran in a tight circle, then forced himself to struggle onward, to leave Kharmael's flaming body behind. He's dead. Dead. Dysan's overwhelmed mind could not comprehend that any more than the realization that the only existence he knew had ended. He waded through smoke and flame, guided only by instinct that sent him always to where the smoke thinned, where the air felt coolest. His brother's death had only just penetrated when he realized that he, too, would die.

  Dysan struggled forward into another wall of fire that ignited his clothes.

  Dysan awakened screaming for the first time in seven years. He heard the echoes of his own cry bouncing from the loft and clamped a hand over his mouth to keep from loosing another. His heart slammed in his chest, and his breath wheezed out in frenzied gasps. It's all right. I found the window. I'm alive. Dysan measured his breathing, felt his heart rate slow. Then, another sound trickled to his ears, familiar but unplaceable. Just as he finally recognized it as priestly magic, the floor collapsed beneath him.

  Air surged around Dysan, and he felt himself falling. Before he could think to do anything, before he could even untangle himself from the blanket, he hit the ground with an impact that shot pain through his shoulder, hip, and gut, stealing his breath. For a moment his eyes and lungs refused to work. Darkness closed over him, filled with spots and squiggles. Then, a sharp spiral of agony swung through him. His lungs spasmed open, taking in air, and his gaze revealed a circle of five women amidst a shattered fire and a pile of billowing ash.

  "It's a child," SaParnith said.

  SaMavis's sooty face softened, and she made a high-pitched syrupy noise. "He's so cute."

  "Adorable," SaShayka agreed.

  Too stunned and hurt to move, Dysan remained still and let them talk around him.

  SaKimarza brushed back the knotted clump of his hair to look into his face. "You're injured, little boy. Tell me where it hurts?"

  Dysan found himself unable to focus on that. Pain seemed to envelop all his parts, and he was more concerned with what these women planned to do with him. Nothing made sense, especially his captors cooing over him like a flock of mother hens. He rolled his eyes to Raivay SaVell, who studied him with equal intent and silence.

  "I hope we didn't hurt him too badly."

  "You don't think he's really the one—"

  The Raivay broke in. "Of course he's the one. Remember, sisters, child or not, he's the rat we caught in our trap."

  "He's the one who—" SaShayka started.

  "Yes."

  "This child—" she started again.

  "Yes."

  All of the women went quiet, studying Dysan. Still uncertain what to do or say, he remained still. He measured the distance to the door with his gaze but knew pain would slow him too much to try. Sleep, slight as it was, had stiffened his wounds from the collapsed stonework; and the fall had reawakened every ache. He had landed on the same hip the toppling rocks had pummeled, and he worried for the bone. Bruises mottled his legs, his wrist ached, and his shoulder felt on fire.

  The women switched to their private language; but, this time, Dysan could hear each word. He darted glances in every direction, only partially feigning fear and pretending not to understand them.

  SaMavis never took her eyes from Dysan. "What do we do now?"

  SaKimarza continued to search her sack. "Find out why he did it. Fix him up. Go from there." She laid out a row of crocks and bottles, and a mouse skittered from the linen. She jerked backward, and a frown scored a face pretty with youth.

  SaParnith dropped to her haunches. "I say we scare him off for good. Threaten to… sacrifice him to Sabellia or something."

  SaMavis gasped. "Sacrilege! Sabellia doesn't take blood—"

  A grin stretched SaParnith's face. Though probably intended to appear wicked, it did not measure up to what the Hand priests could manage with the rise of a single brow. Their eyes had always given them away, and SaParnith's pale brown orbs lacked that dangerous gleam of cruelty. "He won't know that. After what the people here have suffered, he won't doubt—"

  Raivay SaVell interrupted. "That's exactly what we don't want. Any comparison to the evil that nearly destroyed this place, nearly turned them all against the gods. Sabellia sent us here." She made a stabbing motion at the ground to indicate the building, then a broader gesture that encompassed all of Sanctuary. "Here—to spread the word and greatness of Sabellia to the women of this… this city."

  Dysan thought he caught a hint of contempt in her tone, a common reaction of foreigners to Sanctuary for reasons he did not have the information to understand.

  "I just—" SaParnith started. But SaVell had not finished. "Money has corrupted the highest priestesses in Ranke, and Sabellia sent us here to win over the hearts of Sanctuary's women honestly—with selflessness and good deeds, not by terrorizing children."

  SaShayka leapt to her feet. "But ours is genuine!"

  "I'm sure the Dyareelans' seemed that way, too—at first." SaMavis looked up at SaShayka. "Otherwise, they couldn't have grabbed so much power so quickly."

  SaVell still studied Dysan, her yellow eyes vital for one so old and their intensity unnerving. "We can discuss this later. We have another matter to deal with now." Finally, she switched to Ilsigi. "Boy, why did you set our things on fire?"

  "Maybe I didn't." Dysan restored the brisk stop-and-start inflection to the bastard Wrigglie language. "Maybe you just put your old junk too close to the flames." Fatigue slowed his thoughts and pain mad
e him hostile; yet, at the same time, he felt dangerously vulnerable.

  "Maybe nothing." SaVell's gaze remained unwavering. "Ah, so you want to do this the hard way." She raised an arm.

  Dysan flinched.

  As the old woman came no closer, and she did not strike him, Dysan turned his attention to her. A tingle passed through him, and he recognized it instantly as priestly sorcery. He had seen his share of it in front of altars writhing with human bodies or dripping with their blood. This time, he saw no illusions, felt none of the crushing evil that accompanied the summoning of Dyareela's power. This time, it seemed to cleanse him, to strip away the layers of grime that darkened and protected him. His thoughts floated backward, not to the blows, physical and verbal, of his handlers but to the warm solace of his brother's arms.

  The whole proved too much for Dysan. Tears stung his eyes, and he confessed in a whisper, "I live here." The words raised a power and anger all his own, and he rammed through the pain to make his point. "You're going to take away my home. My home!" He rolled his gaze to the ceiling, where the boards hung in jagged disarray, revealing the hole that had once served as his bed. Those timbers had remained solid all this time; he tested them daily. Only sorcery could have caused them to fail instantaneously and without a hint of warning. SaVell had made him fall, and Sabellia had granted her the power, had sanctioned that decision.

  Before Dysan knew it, he found himself cocooned in warm arms, pressed against an ample bosom, and rocked like an infant. He did not fight, just went limp in the embrace, let her body heat wash over him in a wave of soothing he would not have imagined contact with some stranger might fulfill. She smelled clean and of some sweet spice he could not identify.

  The Raivay's voice shattered the sanctity of the moment, struggling to mimic his coarse Wrigglie dialect. "We are building our Sisterhood here."

  Dysan anticipated a flash of anger that never came. He knew better than to trust himself to make significant decisions when fatigue and pain muffled his thoughts, just as he knew better than to fall asleep in a house with an uncontrolled fire. Yet, tonight, he did both. Adopting the Rankene variation the women had used, he spoke in a perfect rendition of an Imperial accent. "I know Sabellia doesn't take human sacrifices, and I don't have parents to which to tell anything."

  Even SaVeil's nostrils flared, though she gave no other sign of her surprise.

  "How… ?" SaParnith stammered. "How… ?" When the words still did not follow, she changed the question. "You don't… look… Rankan."

  Dysan glanced between the women's shocked faces and wondered if he had made the right decision. "I'm Wrigglie. But I do all right with pretty much any language." He could tell by the bewilderment still pasted on their faces that his explanation had not wholly satisfied them.

  Finally, SaKimarza explained, "But that language belongs to our Sisterhood. Only us and Sabellia—"

  SaVell leapt in, as she so often did. "Sabellia picked this city, this building." Though not a real explanation, it served well enough. Even Dysan understood that she believed Sabellia had cast his lot with theirs on purpose, had filled in any blanks between his natural bent toward languages and the Rankene code-speech that served this order.

  Dysan shivered at the loss of control. That anyone might take over his mind and actions chilled him to the marrow, and the understanding that she was a goddess did not make him any more comfortable. He had been so young when the Bloody Hand, and perhaps Dyareela, owned and shaped him; and he had spent the last decade assuring himself that he answered to no one unless he freely chose to do so. He had done some stupid things in the last two days: positioning himself to get crushed by stones, falling asleep near fire, allowing a dream to take over his common sense. Yet, he felt certain all of those mistakes were his own, not attempts by anyone to consume him. The association felt right, secure. Five mothers for the one he had never really known and Grandmother Sabellia. None of these could ever truly take the place of the brother he so desperately missed, but any seemed better than ten more years of loneliness.

  "So what do we do?" SaShayka finally said. Though soft and gentle, her voice seemed to boom into the lengthy silence.

  They all looked at Dysan.

  "I think," he said carefully, "I could be talked into sharing." He had no real power in this negotiation. Ten years of living in this ruin meant absolutely nothing compared with the money the women had spent to buy and restore it. Nevertheless, he continued to bargain. "I don't do heavy labor, but I can crawl into small spaces that need checking or fixing. And I'm very good at listening."

  SaVell smiled. This time, her face opened fully, and her eyes sparkled. Beneath the gruff exterior, apparently, lurked a good heart. "I don't suppose you could use a few hot meals a day, a home with walls, and a bed without a gaping hole in the bottom."

  "I might find use for such things." Dysan managed a smile of his own. "Welcome to my home."

  "Our home," Raivay SaVell corrected as SaKimarza examined Dysan's wounds. "Our home."

  Andrew Offutt: Role Model

  A Tale of Apprentices

  "Better that all such cocky snotty stealthy arrogant bravos were stillborn."

  "Me and my Shadowspawn, skulkin' down the Serpentine…"

  —Bill Sutton

  High of ceiling and sparse of furnishings, the room was half again as long as it was wide. Its illumination was provided by a pair of matching oil lamps, each cast in bronze and resting on a three-legged table at an opposite end of the chamber. The failure of the yellowish light they provided to do more than hint at the arcane drawings and runes on the two longer walls seemed a tease. Both were covered with a medley of intricate, often grotesque ornamentation. Included were fanciful fauna and ornately overblown flora, some with elaborately, even impossibly twining foliage; birds real and un-; lewdly Portrayed lovers with bodies and limbs twining but a little less in-tricately than floral vines; serpents' flowers; medallions and completely untranslatable runic designs. The lamps were fashioned in the likeness of gargoyles so preposterously hideous that no sensible person could believe they were anything but fanciful.

  Yet perhaps not, for one of the two men in the room was their owner, and his trade and life's work was sorcery. Such a one might be capable of summoning up such demons from one of the Seven Hells, might he not? He—Kusharlonikas—was a few months past his one-hundred-first birthday, with a face like a wizened large prune bleached to the color of parchment tastelessly decorated with orangey-brown spots. On the vain side as well as still a sexual being, Kusharlonikas the mage chose, understandably, not to show his true likeness—except when he elected to "wear" the age-overused face as a disguise.

  On this auspicious night in his keep of keeps the master mage affected the likeness of a man of forty, neither handsome nor un-, with luxurious and wavy auburn hair above eyes like chips of greenest jade and a bushy, droopy mustache. Yet he wore a long robe, a deep rich green bordered with gold at hem and neck and sleeve-ends, for even an intemperate devotee of the arcane did have the devil's own time disguising his ancient legs with their knobby knees and varicose veins.

  The other man in this, Kusharlonikas's Chamber of Reflection and Divination, was aware of the mage's age and appearance, for he was Kusharlonikas's apprentice. He was a long-faced and lamentably homely fellow with hair the color of straw—old straw, and subjected to dampness—who was close onto but not quite five-and-twenty years of age. His seeming copy-cat robe of lime green did not require much cloth, for he was both short and slight of build. Indeed, the largest thing about him was his name, which was Ko-modoflorensal.

  His master stood at one end of a long table of polished hardwood topped with a narrow runner ot olive green cloth, well napped and tasseled in gold at either hanging end. He stood moveless, with his hands behind his back, bony left wrist clasped in a right hand burdened with three rings, one of them outsize. Its large brown set seemed to be, oddly, a buckeye. As if listening intently, he stood gazing down at the table, which bore
three objects.

  One was a large, two-handled flagon of some greenish metal that appeared to have little worth. Another was a wooden stick not quite the thickness of a little finger and some two feet long. It bore no bark, and yet did not have a peeled appearance. The third object was fashioned in the shape of an hourglass, but it was not; its sand was but a quarter-hour's worth.

  The younger man with the name too long and the robe too bright stood opposite his master, at the opposite end of the table. A film of perspiration glistened on his face and hands. He had been muttering and gesturing arcanely for over a minute. The hand with which he did most of his gesturing bore a ring with a large setting: an object that was at least the color and shape of a buckeye. "Let us hope no one menaces you when you are at your spelling," his master said, with no seeming regard for distracting the young man, "for you have given an intruder or foeman plenty of time to lay you low."

  "Iffets!"

  The wooden stick returned to motionlessness, but the quarter-hourglass fell over onto its side.

  Komodoflorensal sighed and sagged even more pronouncedly, and watched his master gesture.

  "Idiot!" Kusharlonikas said, while in response to his single, almost casual gesture, the wooden stick on the table between them accomplished the fundamentally impossible feat of becoming a slender, yellowish, two-foot snake that wriggled toward him as if dutifully.

  "Shit!" Komodoflorensal snapped.

  Seven blocks away toward the western wall, Fumarilis the Gatho opened his larder to take out the small, precious bag of sugar he had skimped to purchase, and was shocked to find a torn and empty sack. Furthermore he was staring into the eyes of a small, sugar-stuffed honey badger. It did not even snarl before it pounced, and not at his eyes.