Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune (25 page)

And now this confrontation with Komodoflorensal. It was the apprentice sorcerer who happened to be moving the faster of the two, and so the apprentice cat-burglar stopped dead still and allowed the other to bump him. They were not friends and yet not strangers, for they had met once before … one night not so long ago, in the Chamber of Reflection and Divination of Kusharlonikas the mage.

The one with the roundish, seemingly ingenuous face wearing a longish tunic the color of bile was Komodoflorensal, apprentice to the master mage. The youth of about the same age with the hooded eyes, several weapons, and more sensible blue tunic over leggings the color of a bay horse was the self-named Lone, who in spite of his swagger and desire for arrogance, was apprentice to the master thief Shadowspawn. Seeming only to be meandering, he had asked several people, both vendor and shopper, about an attractive young woman with golden skin, a foreigner with the unusual name of Janithe. No one admitted to knowing anything of her, even of having seen such a person.

“Uh! Oh! Sorry—”

“Hell-o, sorcerer’s apprentice!”

“Uh-oh. You!” Neither of the young men was tall, and Komodoflorensal had to look up only a little above Lone’s expensive red-and-beige sash to meet his dark, dark eyes with his own large, round, medium browns.

“Aye. Me. As you and your master know, the name is Lone. I have heard yours pronounced, but am not sure I can imitate the noise.”

The smaller youth snapped, “I am Komodoflorensal and you well know it, thief! You of all people have no call to be insulting! Last I saw of you, you were fleeing with goods stolen from my master’s innermost chamber.”

Lone swallowed the name-calling—after all, it merely described his chosen profession—and his retort. “I don’t remember fleeing, but of course you must have got an odd view, considering that you was hiding under your master’s spelling table and trying to think of what went wrong with the spell you tried on me.”

“Would you two boys mind taking your little chat out of the very center of the aisle so the rest of us can be about our business?”

The pair of “chatters” turned in the direction of the unpleasant voice to see that their accoster was a woman of some years and many pounds, wearing a couple of garishly striped garments that must have contained enough cloth to make a good-sized tent. Her face made her appear to have applied the entire stock of cosmetics of some happy vendor.

“Oh my beautiful lady!” Lone said, accompanying a sweeping gesture with a profound bow. “I apologize most profusely for my younger brother and me for getting in the way of your august self. I can beg only that you forgive us, two men who have not seen each other in all these years since our mother sold us to a hideous catamite with a stenchy stable full of horses fed far better than ourselves were, these fourteen years agone.”

Both his alleged brother and the offended woman stared at him, but only one of them turned aside to hide a smile that broadened into a grin.

Looking chastened by such politesse, however exaggerated, and guilty, and charmed—and perhaps smitten—the un-beautiful un-lady apologized for speaking so unkindly to “two poor unfortunates,” and Lone apologized again, with florid words and flourishes, and this time Komodoflorensal laughed openly, whereupon
he
apologized, and then Lone made solemn apology for his younger (“much younger”) brother and she apologized again and …

“Could you three babbling idiots get your butts out of the middle of the fraggin’ aisle so the rest of the world can be about our business?!”

Lone and Komodoflorensal exchanged a startled look at the sound of that rough male voice, before turning their heads in its direction. They were just in time to see their previous accoster explode her fist into the approximate center of the face of the voice’s owner, a large, soft-faced man in his thirties.

“You should long since have learned the virtues of patience!” she stormed as he staggered back, and with a brief but not discourteous nod to the two young men she took for brothers, she bustled on her way.

The large fellow whose nose she had messily flattened flopped backward into a woman who was using a bolt or so of yellow cloth with enormous green polka dots to carry her child of a very few months. The infant’s father proved not to have learned the virtues of patience. Turning the offending man with one hand, he gave him a hard backhanded slap with the other. The noise of impact was loud. The yelp of the recipient was not, and this time as he staggered back a tight-clad leg with a pronounced calf muscle was waiting. He was so obliging as to stumble over it. The hapless wight went backward down onto his butt.

“Well done,” Komodoflorensal remarked.

“Thank you,” Lone said. “And might I suggest that this is a good place to be away from!”

Komodoflorensal agreed, and they made some haste in swerving into a different aisle between tents and stalls and kiosks. In mere moments they had blended into its throng.

“I do admire the way you overdid apologizing to that old bird and charmed her,” the open-faced youth said, as they ambled along, inhaling the many, many scents—most of them pleasant. “Were you really sold by your mother?”

“No,” Lone said. “She was murdered, with my father.”

“Unbelievable!” the mage’s apprentice burbled. “That is my story, too!”

The face of the young thief called Catwalker did not change, but his mind did. “Strange,” he said, “but believable enough. I was adopted … eventually.”

“Again, me too!” the excited youth in green said. “Except that it was my great-great-uncle who adopted me. I had seen him but once in my life.”

“Kusharlonikas,” Lone said.

“Aye. Uncle ’Lonikas. Have you been treated badly? By your adopter, I mean.”

“Never by them!” Lone staunchly replied, and it did not occur to him to ask the same question of the ignorant enemy at his side, who seemed so much younger than he was.

After some three steps, Komodoflorensal volunteered the information: “Well I have. I have been tortured in various ways, and even killed.”

Lone jerked but did not stop. “What? Killed?”

“Some of it was illusion and some of it was not. The six times I’ve been killed never really happened.”

While Lone’s mind wrestled with that spectacular revelation, a smallish red-brown dog with droplets falling from its lolling, oddly spatulate tongue brushed his left leg. Strangely, it was the leg between him and his unchosen companion.

Lone was far more interested in Komodoflorensal’s thoughts and memories: While Lone had been tortured and beaten, more than once nearly to death, always the important word had been
nearly.
At last, after swerving around a little girl whose arm was held almost straight up by a mother laden with fresh fruits, he asked, “What’s it like, dyin’?”

Since Komodoflorensal was at that moment jostled against him, Lone felt the other orphan’s shudder. “Horribler than anything you can imagine.”

The survivor of the tortures and mind-assaults of the Dyareelan Pits made no comment on that. What could be more horrible than Strangle and his minions, and their treatment of the children they had worked so diligently to transform into heartless murderers?

But! According to this fellow whose name was the biggest part about him, he had once been strangled not only into unconsciousness—as Lone had been, back when he was called Flea-shit because he was that inconsequential—but to death! The implement of the slow murder of the sorcerer’s apprentice
that
time was a serpent-sinuous demon; the reason was that Komodoflorensal had used a Finding Out spell and somehow sucked a bit of information from the lore-stuffed brain of his mentor. No more than an iota of that vast store, true, but Kusharlonikas was not one to observe such niceties as making punishment match offense. As always, Komoetcetera awoke “from death” alive and hale, but never to forget the terror and horror of the experience.

By an hour past noon the two unlikely companions had purchased and shared food and drink and exchanged many words. No, Komodoflorensal had not seen anyone matching Janithe’s description; yes, he would be on the watch, and leave word for Lone at the vendor’s kiosk they agreed upon.

They were probably the same age, or nearly, as they were similar in height with Lone maybe a finger-width taller; his adoptive mother had assigned him a birthday, more arbitrarily than not. The date made him a few months older than the other apprentice. Strangely and despite himself, Komodoflorensal could not help feeling that he had indeed met a brother and one who was both older and quite respectworthy in spite of his occupation. Later it occurred to him that he had been told not as much as a few lines of the dark Catwalker’s life.

They parted because both had business and places to be. By then the same dog had passed close to them twice more.

Lone’s destination was not at all far. In the bright sunlight of early afternoon he made his way through the noisy throng. Along the way he enlisted the agreement of several additional vendors to be alert to someone who might be Janithe.

His rambling way led to the permanent stall of a bright and ever cheerful woman who identified herself as Saylulah. Word was that she had once been attached to a Rankan noble and had fallen to this low estate of seamstresspeddler, but who ever knew what was true about the things said about this individual or that?

Especially in the town that all too many people sneeringly called Thieves’ World!

Yesterday Lone had picked out a tunic from Saylulah’s supply of ready-mades. Naturally most people made their own attire or, if they were sufficiently well off, had their clothing made to measure. Single males did exist, however, and people with other handicaps that prevented them from sewing, and so even in Sanctuary a market existed for serviceable clothing at a moderate price. Or less, for Saylulah also had available a few used tunics and cloaks. The very cheapest were those with patched rents, some “decorated” with brown stains that the new wearer could claim were his or her own blood …

Yesterday Lone had chosen a moderately priced item, and bartered a bit of ill-gotten gains for a nice but in no way fancy tunic. It was of a well-woven red fabric that had cleverly been dyed, tedded, and cured so as not to look new. It was a bit long for a tunic—particularly for a young man—but not quite a robe. Lone asked the vendor, also a seamstress, to “fancy it up” as he put it, by sewing a stripe around the garment’s hem. Saylulah suggested dark green and he agreed, for the intended recipient was a dull dresser and should welcome a bit of color. Because she was Saylulah, he had committed the strange act of handing over the price in advance, with the agreement that the finished garment would be ready by this morning. No matter that he did not appear at her stall with its green-and-beige-and-yellow awning until after noon.

As a favor today, she also wrapped the additional item he bore.

He carried the packages with him to his regularly scheduled session with the weapon master designated by Chance. Lone and the other orphan boys in the Pits had been inculcated with the concept of remorseless killing without necessity or even reason, but the cluster of trainers had not included a true master of the long blade. According to the man who had been the renowned Shadowspawn, Sathentris from far Ketharvven was the master of swordmasters in Sanctuary.

He and his student parried and swung and dodged and feinted—and ran!—for a full run of the glass before the swordmaster set up a quarter-hourglass and Lone devoted that period to left-handed swordwork, mostly defense. He was not as good this way, of course, since he had not been born left-handed but persisted in training himself to be, in emulation of his idol Shadowspawn.

Sathentris the Keth was not a man given to praising those he taught, but today he was apparently unable to refrain from expressing satisfaction beyond approval. At the end of their approximate hour and a half together his youngest student went away barely curbing a smile that wanted to be a smirk. With the new tunic and another smaller, secret package then, Lone went to visit Heliz Yunz.

As he expected, the churlish genius from Lirt greeted him in manner unfriendly—and in the same tired, faded old once-red cassock made more colorful by buttons of two descriptions and several un-matching patches, in magenta.

The act of robbing a pitifully few coins from Arizak’s keep as a favor to Strick had been an obscenely pleasurable experience for Lone. During that dangerous lark the thief in the palace had naturally taken a little something for himself. The slim bronze tablet he had chanced upon showed four parallel columns of words, each column in a different language—a sort of dictionary? At once he had thought of how such an object would light the eyes of one Heliz Yunz into incandescence, and so Lone added it to his puny loot to take to the man he thought of respectfully as a better-than-well-educated scribe—well, and a wise eccentric, too.

After all, Lone had availed himself of Heliz’s services more than once, and with this thing—whichy from Arizak’s keep he hoped to gain a future service or two. To it he had added, for some reason he could not have stated, the gift tunic. Better to steal the wherewithal to have it made, he had opined, than to shove at the linguist a tunic roached from someone else.

“Open this only later, please,” Lone bade the scholar, who frowned, muttered something not quite audible containing the words “silly youngster”and “nonsense.” But he accepted the softer, larger package, gave it a squeeze and Lone a look, and set it aside. His eyes did indeed light up when he beheld the mystery object from the palace, and it seemed to Lone that the man seemed almost worshipful.

He held it in both hands while he studied it, muttering something unintelligible that his visitor thought contained the words “execration text. Most interesting, most interesting,” he added, in a normal tone. “I shall study it and consult my sources and advise you as to its purpose and possible worth, Lone.”

“You don’t know what it is, then?”

“Would I have said what I said if I were sure of its identity?”

Lone looked down. Damn the man! “Sorry, O Red Scholar,” he murmured, hoping that Heliz Yunz caught the sarcasm—and with no idea as to how close he was to the truth of the identity of the man from Lirt. “Especially since I have another request …”