Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune (24 page)

The bigger of the pair of assailants chuckled. “H’lo there, little feller. Careful you don’t fall off that there roof. You really think you can handle us both?” Without haste, he reached across the area where his tunic bloused over his belt buckle. There hung a sheath of unadorned old leather. From it he slid a knife as long as his thigh.

The level, quiet voice did not change, nor did the shadow-man move. “I really think I can handle you both without raising a sweat, you big cow.”

This time it was the other man who fouled the night with the sound of his voice. “You’re talking to
Wall,
and he’s a
bull,
not a
cow,
you froggin’ piece of shite!”

“Careful. I’ve heard both those stupid words so damned much in the past few weeks from too damned many copycats. I swore to carve the nose off any fraggin’ piece of bat-shite who used both at once.”

The big man chuckled again. He had made no move to lift his long knife. “Who in the seven hells are you, boy?”

The chosen victim of the arrogant pair was doing her best to edge away. Shadows beckoned …

And yet even she froze at the reply of the would-be rescuer on the roof.

“I am called Shadowspawn.”

“Sheeeeee-ite!”

“Not likely. My daddy knowed that oddling called Shadow-spawn.
If
that freggin’ super-thief is alive, he’s got to be older than rocks.”

The youth on the roof was not above theatricality in heaving a great sigh. “You’ve had your warning, ugly. A wise man once told me that a fool and his life are soon parted. You don’t have to go proving that.”

The man who was not as large as his companion grabbed their chosen victim by means of hooking a hairy and muscular arm across her throat. From behind her and above her head he glowered up at the accoster.

“I’d say you’re the one about to prove it, you fruggin’ shike!” he said. “Git far away from here and do it fast, or I break her scrawny neck.”

The squatting human shadow on the roof’s edge said, “Still making foolish noises, are you? Seems to me it’s a very pretty neck. Well, I warned you.”

And then in a blurred movement his hand rushed up and back and then forward, his lower forearm just brushing his ear. The result was that the wide-eyed prisoner heard the little humming sound that terminated in a metallic
shing
accompanying a
thud.
Of course she was not able to see the way the forehead below the soft red cap sprouted a silvery-shining steel throwing star. Four and a half points were in evidence, meaning that one and half of another were mostly imbedded. Yes, even in bone.

“Your pond-scum fool of a friend has just joined his dog-relatives in the Cold Hell, big cow,” the roof-squatter said, low. “Are you ready to join him and them?”

The big man turned out to be not as stupid as he looked. Without pausing to consider, he ran

The far from conventional hero of the little affray dropped down just as the victim, released by the fall of the man behind her, also sank to the pave. The shoulder of her mint-green tunic was torn to what most male observers would consider an interesting degree. She stared up at her rescuer from large dark eyes widened by wonder. He was nowhere near the size of the beast he had just frightened off. He was also positively bristling with sharp steel in various lengths.

“You … you saved me—a stranger!” She spoke those wondering words in an accent that was not born in Sanctuary.

He shrugged, and squatted beside her to look into a pretty, oval face that tapered down to an almost pointed chin. And oh, what skin! “True.”

She gazed up into a dusky face with features that made him appear to be in his teens. Except for the eyes. Strangely
old,
those eyes were, and accustomed to seeing ugliness. He was not a bad-looking youth, her hero, with a sensuous mouth, hooded eyes, and shaped brows. He wore unalleviated black, as if his goal was to be a living shadow, and his jet hair had not been cut in at least two years. It was pulled back into a horse-tail, pulled through a short, narrow sheath of dark leather.

“Did you k—is he dead?”

“Likely.”

“Are you really called Shadowspawn?”

“No. Shadowspawn is my mentor. My name is Lone.” In the large-eyed presence of an attractive and grateful young woman with golden skin more beautiful than any he had ever seen, he could not resist adding, “Some call me Catwalker. Are you ready to stand?”

“I … think so …”

Lone took her hand in a warm one with a rough surface. He noted that it was a small and quite dainty hand, but that it had led no life of leisure. As he rose to his feet in an easy, athletic movement, she saw that his every fingernail had been gnawed. A soul in torment, or the usual dread uncertainty of youth? When he exerted a bit of pressure, she allowed herself to be drawn up just as fluidly—but tottered a bit when she was on her feet. How pale she was, and how
thin!
Her eyes looked deep-set and yet huge—and at a height to gaze directly into his unreadable dark, dark ones. This black-haired boy or very young man was not tall, and looking into those eyes made her think that he trusted no one.

“Give me a name to call you by.”

“Janithe. My name is Janithe.”

“Janithe. Why were you in this night-dark alley?”

“It—it stinks, doesn’t it? Is there a stable just ahead?”

“Does that question mean you don’t want to answer mine?”

“I—I wasn’t really going anywhere. I am—I am a stranger here.”

He already knew the answer, from her accent, but asked anyway: “In this section of town, do you mean, or in
my
town?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, without showing teeth. When he said nothing but continued to gaze into eyes little less enigmatic than his own, Janithe was unable to resist providing more information.

“I just arrived from Caronne. I lived with my mother. She has been a widow for over three years. A little over a month ago she took a lover, and the moment she left for work he came after me. I know she likes him, a lot, and I love her and wish her happiness, and so I left. I came here to seek work …”

Lone left off saying that the only thing he knew that came from Caronne was the drug
krrf
and its deadly distillate. He did state his surmise: “And you have no money.”

She looked down.

“Lots of people haven’t,” he said as a kindness, in a voice with a shrug built in. It was so hard not to stare at her, with that beautiful, somehow
glowing
golden skin! “No one remembers the name of this excuse for a street, Janithe. It is used as often for the emptying of bladders as anything else, and hereabouts it’s well know as the Drainway. It ends less than a block ahead.”

“But it started just over a block back!”

“True.” His face did not change. “Do you want to tell me about that bracelet?” He indicated the long and exceptionally handsome ornament, which was at least plated with gold. What a strange set of curlicues it bore, and runes! In seconds her rescuer surreptitiously gave Janithe’s one item of jewelry the close examination of an expert thief. “That should bring you the price of lodging until you find work. Just a loan on it, even.”

She drew back in some alarm and grasped her braceleted forearm with the other hand. That told Lone that she was horrified or something like, and he decided with a mental shrug that either it had great sentimental meaning to her—or maybe she just could not get the thing off. He turned in the direction whence she had come.

“Coming?”

Janithe hastened to walk beside him along a street that might have accommodated one more person abreast. “I owe you more than money,” she murmured in a soft, more composed voice. “Why on earth were you up on that roof?”

Her rescuer made an unextravagant gesture. “Obviously it’s safer to travel by roof than by street!”

He was pleased that she giggled. “B—but—aren’t you afraid of failing?”

“No. My mentor put it best—‘it’s not the fall that a person needs to fear, but the sudden stop.’”

He was rewarded with another girlish giggle and was minded to tell her the story that Chance-who-had-been-Hanse had told him, with some relish. The sad tale involved a thief whose talent was definitely less than that of Shadowspawn—but then whose was not?

One morning near dawn this fellow, Therames, Shadowspawn said his name was, truly surpassed himself in laboriously ascending to the very top of a flat-roofed building in a neighborhood peopled by the well-off, and from it leaped to the slightly lower roof of another building, which he had judged unscalable. With great care and little speed he worked his way down to a window, and inside to his goal, which turned out to be a particularly nice evening’s take. He was almost discovered, eluded the almost-discoverer, and emerged laden with eminently salable and pawnable booty. So laden that the heavy sack’s weight forced Therames to grunt and pant his way back up onto the roof of that building. So laden was he, in fact, that when he made his sinuous pounce back to the first building, his sack of loot o’erweighed him and he fell five storeys to break his neck. Police of the city watch retrieved him and his loot. They kept the latter …

But Lone did not relate that to this interesting girl or woman, for she was speaking, posing still another question: “Why did you call yourself Shadowspawn?”

“If those two had any sense, it should have scared the snot out of them. Shadowspawn is my mentor, the greatest cat-burglar in the world, and a ferocious foe in a fight. Terribly good with knives of any length. Oh, fart.” He stopped and turned back. “I can be so stupid! I forgot something important! Stand right here where we can be sure you’re safe.” As he spoke he was tucking Janithe into a deep shadow at the wall of the leftward building. “You’re all but invisible in the shadow. I left something back there. I’ll be back faster than you can draw three breaths.”

That was not quite true, for extracting a death-star from the armoring bone of a man’s forehead was no simple task. By the time Lone had wiggled the steel star-shape free and reattached it prominently to his clothing—incidentally removing the undernourished purse from inside the dead man’s tunic—and hurried back to where he had left her, Janithe was nowhere in sight.

“Fart,” Lone muttered, partly because he was impressed, in addition to the dismay he could not help feel. He kept a close eye on the shadows as he departed the Drainway, but no, that was the way his mentor of the apt nickname vanished, but it was not the hiding place of Janithe.

T
he master mage Kusharlonikas was not at all pleased to receive the brief letter. Indeed the boy who delivered it should have thanked his stars that he was well away before the aged mage plucked open the message with withered old fingers, and read it. It was signed by four men who were sufficiently well-off and thus powerful enough to ignore or at least pretend to ignore the putative ruler of Sanctuary this decade, the gr-r-reat noble Arizak: two bankers, a man of the law who owned not only considerable rental property but a glass manufactory as well, and the white mage named Strick and called Spellmaster. Kusharlonikas perceived the “advisory” as an insult and a challenge. He had now lived into his one-hundred-second year, and was no fool. He had no doubt that it was that meddling, grotesquely fat do-gooder Strick who had instigated and probably dictated this letter.

True; it told him nothing he did not know: that his apprentice was an incompetent whose attempts at casting spells had caused alarm and even physical harm to persons and things unknown to him; innocents to whom neither he nor his master meant any harm. Interesting, Kusharlonikas thought, that this little band of long-nosed do-gooders knew some specifics, including a couple of events unknown even to Kusharlonikas until this moment. One or more of these men had seen weird occurrences in a watering hole he had never heard of, and the ghastly ruination of a cat and a couple of vendors’ stands in the city market.

The aged master mage was advised to “take action in this matter. Perhaps he might be well advised to rethink his choice of apprentices?”

His Master Mageship was unamused and unpersuaded, but not unaffected. How dare these turds chastise and challenge him! A while later, in the quiet and ever-shielded privacy of his Chamber of Reflection and Divination, he condemned the message to a slow burning as he stood over it and murmured quiet words while making a series of abbreviated, long-practiced gestures. Oddly, a name he used in his dreadsome incantation was not one of those who had signed the meddlesome letter that so angered him.

B
y strange coincidence that same afternoon, two young men chanced to come face to face in that same widesprawling marketplace. Of course they were far from alone in this sprawling collection of tents and stalls, which was alive with myriad colors and shadings and the mingled scents of food of all kinds and people and the discordant sound of more voices than anyone could ever want to hear—in at least as many accents as the number of fingers on two hands.

Lone had attended the arena games back during the eeriness of the mantling of both the sun and the moon within a few days. He came away with purses numbering rather more than two. He had half fallen in love with the stare-provokingly saffron-skinned warrior maid who called her diminutive, swifter-than-an-arrow-in-flight self “Tiger.” But she was no less dangerous than speedy, and Lone realized that it was only lust he had fallen into, not the perilous morass of love. No matter; ’twas a temporary fancy that took not long to pass, while the purses he had so deftly acquired came only from smiling men—and one overly ostentatious woman—who had collected some of the many, many wagers made on the outcome of every contest

But how the skin of Janithe reminded him of that warrior woman!—and everyone knew that nearly everyone in Sanctuary visited the sprawling market
some
time. So—he stopped at this stall or kiosk and that, and asked about her, and left word that if anyone saw her he would like to know. No one was rude; the never unpleasant youth was too obvious in his cute infatuation with some exotic-to-him girl come here from off somewhere, and what human of any age could resist such a non-phenomenal phenomenon as young love?