The face of chaos - Thieves World 05 (17 page)

'But what will happen when word of this reaches the real Stepsons?' Saliman asked.

'They will be faced with a choice. They can either stay where they are and have their name slandered in the worst hell-hole in the Rankan Empire, or they can return at all speed, risking the label of deserter from the forces at Wizardwall. With any luck, both will happen. They'll desert their post and find they are unable to reestablish their reputation here.'

He locked gazes with his aide, then winked slowly. 'And that, Saliman old friend, is why I'm laughing.'

Lynn Abbey

1

A door that had been obscured by shadows opened to admit a hunched-over figure in dark, voluminous robes. The laboured wheezing of the intruder filled the little room as, with quick, bird-like movements, the winding sheet was opened and the naked corpse revealed. Light entered the austere room from a single barred window high on one wall, illuminating the face of a young woman who lay on a narrow, wooden table, masking her waxen pallor so that it seemed she rested in the gentle sleep of youth, rather than the deeper sleep of eternity. Ulcerous fingers uncurled from the depths of the shapeless robe sleeves, fingers more morbid and repellent than the corpse they probed. From within the cowl came a sound like a laugh - or a sob - and the grotesque hands brushed the young woman's hair away from her neck. His dark robes concealed her as the crippled creature sighed, sniffed, and bent to her throat. He stepped back, examining a slim phial of blood in the faint light.

Still silent, except for his strained breathing, the robed figure lurched back into the shadows, where he conjured an intense blue light and, drop by drop, emptied the blood into it. He inhaled the vapours, extinguished the light with a gesture, and returned his attention to the corpse. His fingers re-examined every part of her without finding any mark other than the small bruise on her neck from which he had removed the blood.

Sighing, he drew the edges of the shroud together again and carefully rearranged the folds of coarse linen. He smoothed her ash-brown hair over the bruise on her neck and, reluctantly, folded the cloth over her face. There was no doubt, this time, that a sob escaped from the shadowed depths of his cowl. There had been many women when he had been young and handsome. They had pursued him and he had squandered his love on them. Now he could remember no face more clearly than the one he had just covered with the linen.

The mage, Enas Yorl, shuffled back into the shadows, lit an ordinary candle, and sat at a rough-plank desk, his face cradled in his unspeakable hands. She had been a woman from the Street of Red Lanterns; from the Aphrodisia House, where blue-starred Lythande was a frequent guest. Yet they'd brought her to Enas for the postmortem. And now he understood why.

Dipping the stylus in the inkwell, he began his report in a script that had been antique in his own youth. ' Your suspicions are confirmed. She was poisoned by the concentrated venom of the beynit serpent.'

Lythande had most likely suspected as much, but the Order of the Blue Star neither knew nor taught everything. It fell to such as himself, more shunned than feared, to research the arcane minutiae of the eon; to recognize the poison for what it was or was not. Enas Yorl continued: The mark on her neck concealed two punctures - like those of the beynit serpent, though, my colleague, I am not at all certain that a serpent slithered up her arm to strike her. Our new ruler, the Beysa Shupansea, has the venom within her - as she has shown at the executions. It is said that the Blood of Bey, the envenomed blood, flows only in the veins of the true rulers of the Beysib, but you and I, who know magic and gods, know that this is most likely untrue. Perhaps not even Shupansea knows how far the gift is spread, but surely she knows she is not the only one ...

A weeping ulcer on Yorl's hand burst with a foul odour, and a vile ichor seeped on to the parchment. The ancient, cursed magician groaned as he swept the fluid away. A ragged hole remained on the parchment; grey-green bone poked through the ruined flesh of his hand. The movement, and the pain, had loosened his cowl. It fell back to reveal thick, chestnut-coloured hair, which glittered crimson and gold in the candlelight - his own hair - if the truth were known or anyone still lived who remembered him from before the curse. He did not often feel the pain of his assorted bodies; the curse that disguised him in ever-shifting forms did not truly affect him. He still felt as he'd felt the instant before the curse had claimed him. Except - except rarely when in mocking answer to a yearning he could not quite repress, he was himself again: Enas Yorl, a man twice, three times the age of any other man. A shambling, rotted-out wreck who could not die; whose bones would never be scoured clean in the earth. He hid the radiant, unliving, and therefore uncursed, hair. The ulcer was congealing with a faintly blue, scaly iridescence. Yorl prayed, as much as he ever prayed and to gods no mortal would dare worship, that sometime it would end for him as it had ended for the woman on his table. He no longer wished that the curse be removed.

The blueness was beginning to spread, bringing with it dis-orientation and nausea. He would not be able to complete his message to Lythande. With a trembling hand, he clutched the stylus and scrawled a final warning: Go. or send someone you trust, to the Beysib wharf where their ships still lie at anchor. Whisper 'Harka Bey' to the waters; then leave quickly, without looking back The transformation sped through him, blurring his vision, softening his bones. He folded the paper with a gross, awkward gesture and left it on the shroud. Paralysis had claimed his feet by the time he'd fumbled the door open and he retreated back to his private quarters, crawling on his hands and knees. There was much more he could have told Lythande about the powerful, legendary beynit venom and the equally powerful and legendary Harka Bey. A few months ago even he had thought that the assassin's guild was only another Ilsigi myth; but then the fish-eyed folk had come from beyond the horizon and it now seemed some of the other myths might be true as well. Someone had gone to considerable trouble, using distilled venom and a knife point to make the wound, to make it seem as if the Harka Bey had slain the courtesan. He did not personally believe the Harka Bey would trouble themselves over a Red Lanterns woman - and he did not truly care why she had been killed or who had killed her. His thoughts surrounded the knowledge that the methods of the Harka Bey, at least, were real and might be turned towards ending his own misery. 2

Of late life had been kinder to the woman known in the town simply as Cythen. Her high leather boots were not only new but had been made to fit her. Her warm, fur-lined cloak was new as well: made by an old Downwinds woman who had discovered that, since the arrival of the Beysib and their gold, there were more things to do with a stray cat than eat it. Yes, since the Beysib had come, life was better than it had been Cythen hesitated, repressed a wave of remembrance and, reminding herself that it was dangerous folly to remember the past, continued on her way. Perhaps life was better for the Downwinds woman; perhaps her own life was now better than it had been a year before, but it was not unconditionally better. The young woman moved easily through the inky, twilight shadows of the Maze, avoiding the unfathomed pools of detritus that oozed up between the ancient cobblestones. Tiny pairs of eyes focused on her at the sound other approach and scampered noisily away. The larger, more feral creatures of the hell-hole watched in utter silence from the deeper shadows of doorways and blind alleys. She strode past them all, looking neither right nor left, but missing no flicker of motion.

She paused by an alley apparently no different from any of the dozens she had already passed by and, after assuring herself that no intelligent eyes marked her, entered it. There was no light now; she guided herself with her fingertips brushing the grimy walls, counting the doorways: one, two, three, four. The door was locked, as promised, but she quickly found the handholds that had been chipped into the outer walls. Her cloak fell back as she climbed and, had there been light enough to reveal anything, it would have shown a man's trousers under a woman's tunic and a mid length sword slung low on her left hip. She swung herself over the cornice and dropped into the littered courtyard of a long-abandoned shrine.

A single patch of moonlight, brilliant and unwelcome here in the Maze, shone amid the rubble of what had been an altar. Holding her cloak as if it were the source of all bravery and courage itself, Cythen knelt among the stones and whispered: 'My life for Harka Bey!' Then, as no one had forbidden it, she drew her sword and laid it across her thighs.

Lythande had said - or rather implied, for magicians and their ilk seldom actually said anything - that the Harka Bey would test her before they would listen to her questions. For Bekin's sake and her own need for vengeance, Cythen vowed that they would not find her wanting. The slowly shifting moonlight fed her terror, but she sat still and silent.

The darkness, which had been a comfort while she had been a part of it, now lurked at the edge of her vision, as her memories of better times always lurked at the edge of her thoughts. For a heartbeat she was the young girl she had once been and the darkness lunged at her. A yelp of pure terror nearly escaped her lips before she pushed both memory and old feats aside. Bekin had been her elder sister. She had been betrothed when disaster had struck. She had witnessed her lover's bloody death and then had been made the victim of the bandits' lust in the aftermath of their victory. None of the brigands had noticed Cythen: slight, wiry Cythen, dressed in a youth's clothes. The younger sister had escaped from the carnage into the darkness. Waiting until the efforts of drinking, killing, and raping had overcome each outlaw and she could bundle her senseless sister away to the relative safety of the brush. Under Cythen's protection, Bekin's bruises had healed, but her mind was lost. She lived in her own world, believing that the bulge in her belly was the legitimate child of her betrothed, oblivious to their squalor and misery. The birthing, coming on an early spring night, much like this, with only the moonlight for a midwife, had been a long and terrifying process for both of them. Though Cythen had seen midwives start a baby's life with a spanking, she held this one still, watching Bekin's exhausted sleep, until there was no chance it would live. Remembering only the half-naked outlaws in the firelight, she laid the little corpse on the rocks for scavengers to find. Again Bekin recovered her strength, but not her wits. She never learned the cruel lessons that hardened Cythen and never lost the delusion that each strange man was actually her betrothed returning to her. At first Cythen fought with Bekin's desires and agonized with guilt whenever she failed. But she could find no work to get them food, while the men often left Bekin a trinket or two that could be pawned or sold in the next village - and Bekin was willing to go with any man. So, after a time, Bekin earned their shelter while Cythen, who had always preferred swordplay to needlework. learned the art of the garrote and dressed herself in dead men's clothes. .

When the pair reached Sanctuary, it was only natural that Cythen found a place with Jubal's hawkmasked mercenaries. Bekin slept safely in the slaver's bed whenever he desired her and Cythen knew a measure of peace. When the hell-sent Whoresons had raided Jubal's Downwinds estate, the younger sister again came to the aid of the elder. This time, she took her to the Street of Red Lanterns, to the Aphrodisia House itself, where Myrtis promised that only a select, discriminating clientele would encounter the ever-innocent Bekin. But now, despite Myrtis' promise, Bekin was four days dead of a serpent's venom. The pool of moonlight shifted as the night aged and Cythen waited. She was bathed in silvery light and blind to the shadows beyond it: undoubtedly the Harka Bey had chosen the rendezvous carefully. She held only her sword hilt and endured the cramps the cold stone left in her legs. Rising above the pain, she sought the mindlessness she had first discovered the day her world had ended and the future closed. It was not the fantastic mindlessness that had claimed Bekin, but rather an alert emptiness, waiting to be filled. Even so, she missed the first hint of movement in the shadows. The Harka Bey were within the ruins before she heard the faint rustle of shoes on the crumbling masonry.

"Greetings,' she whispered as one figure separated from the rest and whipped out a short, batonlike sword from a sheath she wore slung like a bow across her back. Cythen was glad of the sword beneath her palms and of the sturdy boots that let her spring to her feet while the advancing woman drew a second sword like the first. She remembered all Lythande had been able to tell her about the Harka Bey: they were women, mercenaries, assassins, magicians, and utterly ruthless.

Cythen backed away, masking her apprehension as the woman spun the pair of blades around her with a blinding, deadly speed. By now, five months after the landing, almost everyone had heard of the dazzling swordwork of the Beysib aristocracy, but few had seen even practice bouts with wooden swords and none had seen such lethal artistry as advanced towards Cythen. She assumed the static en garde of a Rankan officer - who until the Beysib had been the best swordsmen in the land - and fought the mesmerizing power of the spinning steel. The almost invisible sphere the Beysib woman constructed with the whirling blades was both offence and defence. Cythen saw herself sliced down like wheat before a peasant's scythe - and cut down in the next few heartbeats. She was going to die. . . There was serenity in that realization. The nausea dropped away, and the terror. She still couldn't see the individual blades as they twirled, but they seemed somehow slower. And no one, unless the Harka Bey were demons as well, could twirl the steel forever. And wasn't her own blade demon-forged, shedding green sparks when it met and shattered inferior metal? The voice of her father, a voice she thought she had forgotten, came to her: 'Don't watch what I do,' he'd snarled good-naturedly after batting aside her practice sword. 'Watch what I'm not doing and attack into that weakness!'