The face of chaos - Thieves World 05 (27 page)

Fear's chill tentacles extended all the way to her fingertips now. and she remained kneeling before Lalo, chafing his hands less for his sake than for her own. His eyes were unfocused, the pupils darkly dilated. He was not looking at her. He had not been looking at the painting either, although his face had been turned towards it when she came in. These eyes were focused on something beyond Sanctuary - some inner darkness into which a man might fall forever and find no rest.

Shivering, Gilla tried to close his eyelids, but they slid open again upon that awful, sightless stare. She could feel a scream crouched in her breast, waiting for her to give way to horror and set it free. but she set her teeth painfully and heaved herself to her feet.

Hysterics would do neither of them any good now. Time enough to release the grief that was building in her when - if - there was no hope for him. Perhaps it was some strange seizure that would soon pass, or a new sickness that time and her strict nursing would cure. Or perhaps (her mind probed delicately at a darker thought and flinched away), perhaps it was sorcery.

'Lalo -' she said softly, as if her voice could still reach him somehow, 'Lalo my darling, it's all right. I'll get you a doctor; I'll make you get well!'

Already her mind was considering. If he did not wake of himself by tomorrow she would have to find a physician - perhaps Alien Stulwig - she had heard that his potions saved more lives than they took.

The teakettle began to wail, and as she hurried across the room. her hip set the easel teetering. Without stopping, she picked it up and set it in the corner with the picture facing the wall.

Lalo peered uneasily through murky clouds that roiled about him like the mage wind that had devastated Sanctuary the year before. But his life was still in him, though the stink was enough to drive the breath from a man's lungs. For a moment he thought himself back in the sewers of the Maze, but there was too much light. So where in the name of Shalpa Shadow-lord had he gotten to?

He took a step forward, then another, his feet finding their own way over the uneven ground. The colours that streaked the clouds nauseated him - sulphur yellow that shaded into a livid pink like an unhealed scar, and then to something else - an unnameable colour that made his eyes hurt so that he had to look away.

Perhaps I am dead, he thought then. Poor Cilia will grieve for me, hut she has her hoard, and the older children are earning money of their own. She will do better without me than I would if she had left me alone ... The thought was bitter, and he found himself weeping as he stumbled along. But the tears had no substance and after a little they disappeared. He returned to his probing, as a man will tongue the sore space where a tooth has gone. All of the priests were wrong, both the ones who said that the gods take departed souls to paradise and those who are convinced one is condemned to Hell. Or perhaps I have such a spineless soul that I have deserved neither, and so they have sentenced me to wander here!

Lalo had spent half his life dreaming of escape from Sanctuary. But now he had lost Sanctuary, and he was astonished by the passion of his longing to see it again.

Something scurried by him and he jumped. Was it a rat? Were there rats here? And surely now he could see cobblestones beneath his feet. Trembling, Lalo stared around him as dim forms precipitated from the shadows - walls, perhaps, with arched doorways and the eaves of roofs peaking like broken teeth against a lurid sky. There - surely that was the broad facade ofJubal's place, but that was impossible - the Stepsons had burned it, hadn't they? And then he was certain of the wrongness, for next to it he saw the familiar skewed sign of the Vulgar Unicorn, but the unicorn's eyes glowed evilly, and blood dripped down its spiralled horn.

Abruptly he realized that he was beginning to hear sounds, too - the kind of drunken laughter that comes from men who watch a bully's fist smash a boy's face to raw meat, or who take a woman one after another: the kind of screaming he had heard once when he hurried past Kurd's workshop, and the choked gurgle the hanged men made as they died in the Palace Yard. He had heard all those sounds in Sanctuary, and closed his ears to them, but he could not ignore the sobbing that seemed to come from somewhere just before him, the hushed, incredulous whimpering of an abused child.

I was wrong, he thought, I am in Hell after all!

Lalo began to run forward, and suddenly figures were all around him. Hawkmasks and Stepsons struggled as lopped limbs flew like scythed wheat and drops of blood splattered the cobbles like rain. A man staggered by him and Lalo thought that it was Zanderei; then the figure turned and he reeled back, for the face was gone.

Another came towards him - Sjekso Kinsan, with whom he had shared a drink sometimes in the Vulgar Unicorn, and behind him a woman with long amber hair. Lord Regli's wife. Samlane. whom Lalo had painted long ago before he met Enas Yorl. before the woman had died. There were others whom he thought he recognized, thieves whose contorted features he had seen on the gallows. Hell Hounds or mercenaries whom he had seen in Sanctuary for awhile and then saw no more.

They were looking at him, now. and closing around him. Lalo began to run, burrowing through the dark maze of this shadow Sanctuary like a maggot in an ancient corpse, seeking some unimaginable safety.

'Woman, you were fortunate to get me here at all!' Alten Stulwig said stiffly.

'My patients come to me. and I am certainly not accustomed to visiting this part of town!'

'But you know that my husband has influential friends who might object if you let their pet artist die unseen, don't you!' said Gilla nastily. 'So you stop avoiding my eyes like a whore with her first customer and tell me what's wrong with him!' She lifted an arm as broad as Stulwig's thigh and he swallowed and glanced nervously down at the man on the pallet.

'It's a complex case, and there's no need to confuse you with medical terminology.' He cleared his throat. 'I am afraid '

'Now that I will believe!' Gilla snatched his satchel and held it to her massive breast.

'What - what are you doing? Give me that!'

'I don't need your leech's twaddle, nor your evasions either. Master Alten. You just find something in this bag of yours that will make my man well!' She thrust it back at him and he shrugged, sighed, and opened it.

'This is a stimulant, dograya. You steep it into a tea and spoonfeed him four times a day. It will strengthen his heart, and who knows, it may bring him around.' He tossed the little packet on the coverlet and rummaged around in the bag again, bringing out several yellowish cones wrapped in a twist of cloth.

'And you can try burning these - if the smell doesn't arouse him I don't know what will.' He straightened and held out his hand. 'Two sheboozim -gold.'

'Why Alien, I'm surprised - aren't you going to ask me to share your bed?'

Gilla's laughter covered bitterness she had not allowed herself to feel for a long time as he blanched and looked away. She drew from between her breasts the thin chamois bag in which she kept her reserve of gold. There was more, hidden cunningly beneath floorboards or in the wall - even Lalo did not know where it was-but a house could burn. Better to keep something on her person against emergencies.

She slapped the coins into Stulwig's moist palm and watched, glaring, as he packed up his satchel and picked up the staff he had leaned against the door.

'The blessing of Heqt upon the healing -' he mumbled.

'And upon the hands of the healer,' Gilla responded automatically, but she was thinking, I have wasted my money. He doesn't believe his paltry herbs will do any good either. She listened to the hurried clatter of Stulwig's sandals on the stairs as he hastened to reach his own lodging before darkness fell, but her eyes were on Lalo's still face.

And suddenly it seemed to her that his breathing had deepened and there was the suggestion of a crease between his brows. She stiffened, watching, while hope fluttered in her heart like a trapped moth, until his features grew smooth again. She thought of the great waves that sometimes slapped at the wharves though the sky was clear, that fishermen said were the last ripple from some great storm far out to sea.

Oh my beloved, she thought in anguish, what bitter storms are raging in the far reaches where you wander now?

The children were waiting for her when she came out of the studio, all of them except for her oldest, Wedemir, who was ajunio"-master with the caravans. Her daughter Vanda had gotten leave from her Beysib lady when Gilla sent for her, and sat now with Alfi on her lap, looking at her mother with a fair approximation of the flat Beysib stare. Even her second boy, Ganner, had begged time from his apprenticeship with Herewick the Jeweller to come home. Only eight-year-old Latilla, playing with her doll on the floor. seemed oblivious of the tension in the room.

Gilla glared back at them, knowing they must have heard her argument with Alten Stulwig. What did they expect her to say?

'Well?' she snapped. 'Stop looking at me like a batch of gaffed cod! And somebody put the teakettle on!'

Lalo was following the scent, familiar as the stink of a man's own closestool, of sorcery.

He knew this much about the strange existence he was caught in now - even a dauber whose only magic had flowed through his . fingers could smell sorcery here, and though in that other life Lalo had been wary of wizards, he had not been quite wary enough, and that was the start of the road that had led him here.

There, for instance, was the gaudy presence of the Mageguild. a mixture of odours from the faint aromas of the magelings to the full-blown, exotic outpourings of the Hazard-class wizards who were their masters - a potpourri with all the mixed fascination of Prince Kitty-Cat's garbage bin. Here also was the alien tang of Beysib ritual, and the fuggy flavours produced by all the little hedge-wizards and crones, and the wavering scents of those who served in the temples of the gods.

But what he was seeking was not in the temples, though it came from a place that was close by - a house whose very foundations were sorcery. Someone was working a spell there even now, elegant magics that sent spirals of power smoking into the dim air. Lalo had known that flavour before, though he had not then recognized it - the unique atmosphere that surrounded Enas Yorl. Focusing, he found that he could interpret what he was sensing as colour, a line of light that snaked outward, another crossing it and another, a net to capture any spirit that might be wandering there. And Lalo could feel the presence of those Others, beings less conscious than the ghosts he fled, but more active and aware.

A Symbol flickered into being in the centre of the knot, pulsing lividly, colour, shape, and flavour all combined to lure its intended prey. Lalo shuddered as something swept by him. The glowing lines distorted and the Symbol in their midst dissolved and then reformed, imprisoning a roil of writhing energy and forcing it into a form that human eyes could, however unwillingly, see. But the Gateway that had opened for the creature was still there, and Lalo, frantic for contact, thrust himself through.

"Ehas, barabarishti, azgeldui m 'hai tsi! Oh thou who dost know the secrets of Life and Death, come to me! Yevoi! YevadF The Voice snapped shut the gap and set the imprisoned entity to whirling in a shower of nitrate and sulphur-smelling sparks.

Lalo contracted like an upset snail, seeking to avoid the touch of that light, the sound of those words. They were the language of the plane from which the spirit had come, and Lalo's present condition gave him the power to directly apprehend them, and to realize that there were worse places than the one in which he found himself now.

'Evgolod sheremin, shinaz, shinaz, tiserra-neh, yevoi!' The Voice rolled on, conjuring the creature to bring to him the knowledge of how to separate the soul from a body to which it had been obscenely and indissolubly fettered by sorcery, of a way, though the price of it might be annihilation, to set such a soul forever free. Lalo cowered from knowledge that was never meant for his ears. But presently the Voice stilled, the echoes died away, and Lalo allowed himself to focus on tlie insubstantial figure that stood within its own shimmering circle beyond the triangle within which Lalo and the demon shared an unwilling captivity. It was Enas Yorl - it must be - yes, he would always know those glowing eyes.

And at the same moment Enas Yorl appeared to realize that his summoning had been more successful than he intended. A wand rose, and power swirled and eddied in the still air.

'Begone, oh ye intruding spirit, to thine own realm where thou shall wait until I do summon thee!'

Lalo was tumbled by a riptide of power and for a moment knew a desperate hope that the sorcerer's instinctive house-cleaning would send him home. But where was home, now?

Then the power ebbed, and Lalo sat up, still in the triangle. The demon in the sigil beside him spat and reached for him with flaming claws.

'Oh thou spirit who hast come to my summoning, I conjure thee to tell me thy name.' Enas Yorl seemed unmoved by his first failure, and Lalo began to understand the patience and plain nerve required for wizardry. He got to his feet and approached the edge of the triangle as closely as he dared. 'It's me, Lalo the Limner. Enas Yorl, don't you recognize me?'

And as he waited for the sorcerer to reply, Lalo realized that he himself recognized Enas Yorl, and that was very strange, for the essence of the curse that tormented the sorcerer was that his form should never remain for long the same. With a kind of horrified fascination, Lalo looked into the true face of Enas Yorl.