Shadows of Sanctuary978-0441806010 (11 page)

'Then you'll run, will you, and find some safer place to steal.' The voice ground like rocks tumbling. 'And you'll ignore my gold and protection. Both of which you may need. - It's no great thing I ask, simply a matter of spying out where she is. Did I ask you to go against her yourself? No. A small favour, well paid. And you've done favours like that before. Would you have that known - that you've worked in high places? Your past patron wouldn't appreciate that publicity. He wouldn't retaliate against me, no. But you - how long do you think you'd live, thief, if your connections went public?'

Hanse had sucked in his breath. He forced a grin then, struck a lighter pose, hand on hip. 'So, well, paid in gold, you said?'

'After.'

'Now.'

'Darous, give the man sufficient as earnest. And give him the amulet.'

Hanse turned from the wizard, whose voice had acquired a hissing quality: and the hand - had vanished into one of those blinks of the eye that deceived the mind and memory that anything had - a moment earlier - been there. Hanse took the chain and put it over his head. The amulet itself hit his bare throat and it was bitter and burning cold. The servant held out a purse. Hanse took that, felt the weight in his hand, opened the neck of it and looked at the gold and silver abundance inside. His heart beat wildly, while against his neck the metal failed to be warmed as metal ought, stayed there like a lump of ice. It sent a vague malaise through him, which changed character from moment to moment like -'So what am I supposed to do?' he asked. 'And where do I look?'

'A house,' a woman's voice said to his right, and he looked, blinked, found only the hooded form in the chair. 'Seventh in the alley called Snake. On the right as you go from the Serpentine at Acban's Passage. She lodges there. Mark what she does and where she goes. Don't attempt to prevent her. I only want to know the business that brought her to Sanctuary.'

Hanse let go a sigh, relief, for all that the robes shifted again -felt a wild confidence in himself (it might have been the money) that he could get out of this easily, and with still more money, and an employer satisfied, who was powerful and rich. Hanse Shadowspawn, Hanse the thief, small Hanse the knife ... had friends in high places, a condition unexpected. He expanded in this knowledge and stood loose, dropped the purse into his shirt, ignoring the chill at his neck. 'So, then, and I come here from time to time and report to you.'

'Darous will find you from time to time,' the same voice said. The changing seemed to have settled for the moment. 'Depend on that contact. Good-day to you. Darous will show you out.'

Hanse made a nourish of a bow, turned to the servant and indicated they should go.

'The blindfold,' the blind servant said. 'Use it, master thief. My master would regret an accident, especially now.'

Hanse put his hand on the metal droplet that hung like ice at his throat, turned to glower at the wizard. 'I thought this was supposed to take care of things like that.'

'Did I say so? No, I didn't say. I wouldn't be rash in relying on it. Against some things it has no protection at all. My guardians in the hall, for instance, would never notice it.'

'Then what good is it?'

'Much ... in its right place. Afraid, thief?'

'Huh,' Hanse said critically. Laughed and swung on his heel, caught the blind servant by the arm and started out with him. But remembering the movements in the outer hall, the thing which had brushed at his leg - 'All right, all right,'

he said suddenly, and let go the man's arm to put the blindfold back in place.

'All right, rot you, wait.'

The thief went, and Enas Yorl rose from his chair. His shape had settled again into a form far more pleasant than most. He walked to a hall more interior to his house, examined hands delicate and fine, that were purest pleasure to touch

- and all the worse when they would begin ... next moment or next day ... to change.

It was a revenge, a none too subtle revenge, but then the wizard who had cursed him had never been much on subtleties, which was why his young wife had had Enas Yorl in her bed in the first place - a younger Enas Yorl in those days, but age meant nothing now. The forms his affliction cast on him might be old or young, male or female, human or - not. And the years frightened him. All the time he had had, to become master of his arts, and his arts had no power to undo another's spell. No one could. And some of his forms, still, were young, which suggested that he did not age, that there was no end to this torment - for ever. Yet wizards died, lately, in Sanctuary. Tell the thief that was the name of the game, and even threats might not persuade him. But in these deaths, Enas Yorl was desperately, passionately interested. Ischade ... Ischade: the name tasted of vile rumour; a wizardous thief, a preyer upon wizards, a conniver in shadows and dark secrets, this Ischade, with reason to hate the prey she chose. And all her lovers died, softly, gently for the most part; but Enas Yorl was not particular in that regard.

He paused a moment, hearing the great outer doors boom shut. The thief was on his way, thief to take a thief. And Enas Yorl felt a sudden cold. Wizards died, in Sanctuary, and this possibility fascinated him, taunted him with hope and fear: with fear -because shapes like this he wore turned him coward, reminding him there were pleasures to be had. He feared death at such times ... while the thief he had sent out went to find it for him.

Darous came back, softly stopped on the marble paving. 'Well done,' Enas Yorl said.

'Follow him, master?'

'No,' Enas Yorl said. 'No need. None at all.' He looked distractedly about again, with the queasiness of impending change upon him. He fled suddenly, his steps quicker and quicker on the pavings. Darous could see nothing - Darous sensed, but that was another matter. There was, however, pride. And within the hour, in a dark recess of the house with the basilisks prowling the halls unchecked, something gibbered within a pile of midnight robes, and with keen sense of beauty imprisoned in that moaning heap, longed towards oblivion.

Darous, who saw nothing, sensed the essence of this change and kept himself to other halls.

The basilisks, whose cold eyes saw very well, writhed scaly-lithe away in haste, outstared and overwhelmed.

5

Not many women came to the Unicorn, not many at least of the elevated sort, and this one took a table to herself and held it. One of the Unicorn's muddled regulars brushed by, and leaned close, and offered to sit down ... but a long hand from beneath those black robes waved an idle and disinterested dismissal. A ring glinted there, a silver serpent, and the bully's bleared eyes stared at that, at immaculate long nails, into dark almond eyes beneath the shadowy hood. And a fog of alcohol seemed to grow thicker then, so that he forgot all the wittiness he had meant to say, forgot for a moment to close his mouth. A second wave of the thin, olive-skinned hand and he forgot everything and stumbled away in confusion.

'Acolyte,' Cappen Varra thought in his own counsel, slouched on a bench in the nook nearest the back door. There was somewhat of chaos in the Unicorn of late, a certain lack of the authority which had held the peace, and that sort moved in, cheap muscle. But the woman - that was something extraordinary, like the Unicorn before; a woman, a stranger in the neighbourhood... He was intrigued by the dark robes and the fineness of them, and his fingers moved restlessly on the moisture-ringed tabletop, thinking of a song, fingering imaginary strings of the harp he had pawned (again) and thinking - oddly - on Hanse Shadowspawn, in another and quite irrelevant train of thought, as Hanse had ridden his mind all day. Sjekso gone, Hanse vanished utterly, and night falling outside ... Hanse was up to no good, it was certain. There had been neither sight nor sound of him all day long and certain whispers passed in the Unicorn, with more and more credibility: of revenge, of Hanse, about the likelihood of survival of one Mradhon Vis - or Hanse, should the two meet. And about a certain blind man who had found his way without aid into the Unicorn and out again, with Hanse in tow... a blind man and no beggar, for all his looks - but a man of darker rumour.

It was curious business, and more than mildly unpleasant. Cappen was not sanguine. Hanse stalking Vis - it was quite unlikely. Hanse was all temper and bluster. If anyone was doing the stalking it was likeliest to be Vis, and Hanse was ill-advised to have prodded that surly-countenanced bastard ... far more trouble than Hanse really wanted, that was sure. Likely it was Hanse in hiding, if Vis had not yet got him. Cappen picked up his cup again, and of a sudden his eyes hooded and while his hand carrying his cup to his lips never faltered, the sip he took was slow and studied: he watched a second man make attempt on the lady's table.

And that was Mradhon Vis himself... who went up quietly, and met no rebuff at all. The lady lifted her face and her eyes to him - a face certainly worth a song, although a dark and sombre one. And when her eyes lit on Mradhon Vis, very quietly the lady got to her feet and in Vis's still silent company... walked towards the back door of the tavern. Only a few heads turned, of those at the other tables, and those only casually. There was at the same time the faintest ofpricklings at Cappen's nape, a feeling he knew: he touched the amulet at his throat, a silver coiled serpent... a gift, a protection against spells, more efficacious than most priest-blessed gimcrack tokens .... under its own terms. He saw, with a touch of unease the greater because no one else in the room seemed to see ... how Mradhon Vis and his dark companion moved, with common purpose and peculiar menace.

Strangeness enough progressed in Sanctuary ... deaths which made a man naturally think on protections of the sorcerous kind, and to be glad of them if he had them, because where the powerful died, wizardry was about, selective of its victims thus far, but not - perhaps - exclusive of them. There was Sjekso Kinzan, who had been no one. Cappen wondered did such protection as he possessed

... protect or mark him; and as the lady and Mradhon Vis came past his table by the door A moment Cappen was looking up and the lady looked down at him, more familiar in that stare than he would have liked. The prickling about the amulet became strong indeed while he stared, lost in those dark eyes with a sense of deadly peril, of his whole life resting loose and endangered, as if some small nudge on anyone's pan might tumble it. 'You're beautiful,' he murmured, because three truths was the rule of the amulet if it was to work at all - 'You're dangerous and foreign here.'

She lingered, and reaching down picked up his cup where it sat; lilted it, sipped and set it down again, all with an eerie hint of humour or menace flaunted at him, at him who alone in the room but Mradhon Vis - or was he exempt? - Alone of all the others,

Cappen stared back at her with his mind clear and with knowledge, with something gut-wrenching telling him that everything about this woman was askew. She smiled at him, a parting of the lips on white teeth, a flash of dark eyes, an impression that she admired what she saw... and all the fineness he kept so studiously, his elegance, different from others about him, his talents, his - if streetwom - finery ... was suddenly perilous to him, marking him out among all the rest. And most of all... she knew he resisted her. She left then, swept out of the door which Mradhon Vis held open, a gust of wind and a sudden thud of the door closing. Cappen wanted wine... but his hand stopped short of the cup she had just set down again, the metal she had had her lips to and the wine her mouth had tasted. He pushed back from the table and the bench scraped loudly over the noise of the other patrons. He hesitated, looking at the door which led out to the backways, not wanting to go out there, in the gathering dark.

But Mradhon Vis, linked with that, and Sjekso cold dead with no mark on him; and Hanse outright disappeared, hunting Mradhon Vis, as all the Maze surmised ... Hanse had involved himself in something which was likely to be the death of him, and what concern that was to Cappen Varra was unclear to Cappen himself, only that he had drunk with Hanse of late, with a short and lately successful thief and ruffian who had wanted - almost pathetically - to acquire style, who spent most that came into his hands on the finer things, a cloak -oh gods! that cloak!

- Cappen's aristocratic soul shuddered. But of the unassuming ruffians in the lot, of what quality there was to be had in the Maze, in Hanse there existed at least the hankering after something else.

The business had marked Hanse down - and now stopped and stared at himself. It was always safer, he reckoned, to walk at a thing than to have it walking up at his back - later and unforeseen. Cappen opened the door carefully, went out into the backways, his hand on his rapier hilt, recalling that Sjekso had used the same door last night. But there was only the dark outside, amid the litter of old barrels and used bottles. The woman in black had vanished, and Vis with her, vanished, and in what direction Cappen was in no wise certain. Patience was rewarded. Vis, by the gods, and this Ischade ... in company; and Hanse crouched lower in the shadows of the alley, a chill up his back, his fingers rubbing at the well-polished hilt of his left boot knife. That promised a revenge within his own grasp: so Yorl wanted the woman, and if Yorl settled with her, then Vis went in the same bargain. Hanse evened his breathing, calmed himself with wild hopes, first of getting out of this Yorl business and then of having Yorl to settle Vis - the means by which the street might be safe again for Hanse Shadowspawn. Report, Yorl had said, and by the gods, he was anxious to have it done, if only they went to earth for the night... They turned, not the way he had anticipated, towards the lodgings he had been watching, but the other way, towards the Serpentine. Hanse swore and slipped out from his concealment, shadowed them most carefully in their course through the debris of the alley and out on to the street. The moon was not yet up; the only light came from the city itself, a vague glimmering on a bank of fog towards the harbour which diffused across the sky and promised one of those nights in which light spread through milky mist, from whatever sources - a thieves' night, and a worse to come.