Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune (28 page)

Sharp-eyed even at his age, Chance noted. the odd little slit-like birthmarks just behind/under Janithe’s ears. He said nothing about it until she and Lone had left. Strick and Linnana had not noticed, and did no speculating.

The subject of the three mutilation murders did not come up that night, and gradually conversation and speculation on that subject petered out among the general populace of Sanctuary.

On the eighth day after the new moon Lone was happy to move himself and his beloved into new and larger accommodations. By that time it had become necessary for Scaff to hire an assistant, and the business of the seamstress Saylulah was up, too. She knew very well the cause was that Lone and Janithe kept blabbering about Saylulah and her expertise, and soon the charming couple had others talking about her as well. She and others talked about the charming couple, too. People looked their way, smiling. People watched them, and nudged each other, and rolled their eyes, and exchanged winks. Such an attractive couple! So obviously enraptured with each other. No one ever saw them apart anymore. Janithe even accompanied Lone to his lessons in swordwork, and presumably watched, or perhaps merely waited.

The only time Janithe was not present was when Lone in the persona of Catwalker dealt with the husband of the granddaughter of Shive the Changer, a man who exchanged foreign money in quantity for local, and who bought this and that object without asking questions. Business was business.

As usual Strick and Linnana celebrated the full moon by inviting Lone and Chance, and this time they had no thought of trying to find a girl for him. No one need say aloud that the time of the full moon was not good for such night work as practiced by Chance and his apprentice. Linnana, especially, noted that the girl with the fascinating skin seemed paler and thinner than she had a matter of mere days ago. By now she had new earrings, a bracelet, and a luxurious dress too nice for any occasion in her life.

On the twenty-first day they had an argument over nothing in particular and spent most of a day and all night making up and trying to atone to each other.

On the first night of moondark, however, Lone left his woman in their new home while he saw to business, and next morning, for the first time in thirty days and nights, another young man had been lured or surprised in a narrow alley and hideously clawed and bitten, and his lungs ripped out—to be consumed?

Again Sanctuary exploded with horror, anger, fear, and endless exchange of opinions and speculations.

After a month, “everybody knew”—that is, many many regulars in the market—that daily the darling couple bought breakfast or lunch from Scaff. That partially explained the fact that the same pair of Sharda investigator appeared there to, as they told Scaff and others, talk to Lone. They knew he had been out last night, and wanted to know where he had been and what he had done. Sayn and Ixma waited a long time before at last deciding they had been idle long enough, and went away.

Lone and Janithe did not show up until over an hour later, for some reason both lovers had slept both deeply and late.

“I saw the inhuman thing that killed those fellows last month,” Lone said, frowning, “and I’m the one found the body, and I told people, and the Sharda man came to question me. Now it has happened again, and however he found out I was not home last night, he did. Naturally he suspects me … and Scaff, I didn’t kill anybody—but I can’t tell him where I was last night, either.”

Scaff understood. “In that case, Lone, Janny—do not turn around. Just walk around my booth and get yourself out of here, fast. A man of the City Watch is heading this way with his hand on his pommel, and it ain’t me he’s got his eye on.”

“Go left,” Lone muttered, and Janithe did while he went rightward, and around Scaff’s place of business and across a thronged aisle and between two other vendors and cut left and on a ways farther and then left and between two other stalls, and left, and through the crowd, and out of the market. Only then did he unexcitedly say, “Run,” and they did.

“
M
aster,” a frowning Komodoflorensal said, “look here. That ornate bracer I learned of … it has to do with the daughter of the ancient beast-god of the sea.”

His master turned on the apprentice a frown of his own, almost a murderous one. “Are you speaking of Ka’thulu?”

“Aye, Uncle ‘Lonikas! Ka’thulu!”

“Nonsense, idiot! Let me see your alleged work, fool. That fancy bauble could not possibly be—name of Consternatis! A miracle! For once you are right!”

“
I
’m glad my man found you,” a grim-faced Strick told Chance, the moment that man and his cane tap-tapped their way into his office-cum-spelling chamber.

A bit red of face and panting from the effort of hurrying in response to the urgent summons of his friend, Chance sank down in the chair across the long, blue-draped table that was the white mage’s desk. He was surprised to find Linnana also present

“Rushing across town is not so easy as it once was,” he gasped, and accepted the towel Linnana proffered. He wiped his face and set his hand to his chest, a bit left of center. There was that irregular pounding again, damn it. “What is so urgent?”

“We have work to do,” Strick said, with no lessening of the deadly seriousness of his face or manner. “Lone has to be warned, and more. That long bracer on Janithe’s arm is one the beast-god Ka’thulu gave to his daughter when he proclaimed her the sklamera, chief among the demons of his domain—the sea.”

“Ah gods,” Strick said, seeming to grow smaller in his chair. “You talk of sorcery! Ach, Ils our Father knows how I hate sorcery!”

Strick only nodded, having heard nothing he had not heard before from this man. “The sklamera never took it off—including in the several hundredth year of her life when she lay with a mortal youth and deceived her father by secretly equipping the lad with gills and becoming his wife. Love, supposedly, true love. The sea-god was outraged and bent on dastardly vengeance, but his daughter persuaded him to forbear. Years passed, and more years, but they were only moments to the beast-god and the demoness. Of course she did not age, while her husband did, and that made him increasingly unhappy. He dealt with his realization of mortality by betraying her, and with a mere mortal woman. Ka’thulu proved so vengeful
and so evil
as to do horrible death on the human. He made the sklamera watch his agony as he died, far beneath the waves.”

Chance nodded dully. “He sealed the gills she had given the man …”

“Exactly. And then the king-beast of the sea turned on his own daughter, as if she had not been punished enough for having shown a preference for an air-dweller. The spell he cast on her is a particularly nasty one. Without lungs and with her gills sealed, the sklamera can exist only one way—she is forever condemned to imprisonment within the bracer.”

“Ah, gods, Strick! Please don’t tell me that this sklamera is … that it somehow
possesses
Lone’s beloved!”

Linnana turned her unhappy face away. Strick nodded. “You saw the mark of the sea-demon on Janithe—the rudimentary gills in her neck. Linnana knows the lore better than I do. Linnana?”

She spoke quietly and seemingly without emotion. “An ancient legend among the Beysib is known too to the S’danzo. Throughout the ages a succession of comely young women has been so unfortunate as to draw the attention of the unhappiest of all females, a demon who exists only by inhabiting a bauble of gold. Their name for her is scilarna. This demon bonds herself to the surrogate, and when a moonless sky renders the sea equally black, she is reminded of a long-ago unfaithful love. She takes revenge on the deceitful male sex by choosing a comely young man each night of the moon-dark, and by ripping out of him that which makes him human, and mortal—”

“His lungs,” Chance murmured, staring down at nothing and remembering a long-lost love.

“I need not tell you this is the time of the new moon,” Strick said. “A fresh victim was found this morning. No matter how painful for us and Lone, he has to be warned.”

“There’s more,” Linnana said. “The Watch want him.”

The three exchanged looks of anguish and alarm, and began to plan.

T
aran Sayn and the helmeted, cuirassed man of the Watch who accompanied him reached the apartment recently rented to Lone and Janithe, and knocked, and knocked again, and called out. Then Sayn shouted, and the policer leaned spear and shield against the wall and used his fist to pound the door, and shouted, and suddenly Sayn did a silly thing: He reached out and tried the handle.

The door began to swing open.

“If the occupation of this Lone fellow really is what we more than suspect,” Sayn said while the door swung slowly inward, “it’s hard to imagine that he fails to lock up when he leaves his own home! Well, inside, Taganall, and let’s see what we see.”

It hardly seemed necessary for Taganall to draw sword before he entered the darkened apartment, but he did and his companion made no comment. Their search was cursory, since all they sought was a man. They found no one, and no signs of struggle either.

Two blocks away, however, in the direction of that area of town where the four lungless victims had been found, they found a cohort of Taganall’s. The uniformed man’s left arm was still through the first strap of his shield, and his hand still clutched the second, but his sword was fast in its sheath and his spear lay on the pave. Beside it was his body, which had been gorily ripped apart by talons backed by fearsome strength.

“Odd,” Sayn said, ignoring the suddenly bloodless face of his uniformed companion. “His chest hasn’t been torn open. That means he still has his lungs. That tells me he was not tonight’s intended victim, Taganall. He must merely have run afoul of the thing in pursuit of his normal duties.”

“Not normal,” Taganall gasped. “Not normal. Every man in the Watch is on the streets tonight. We’re all going to be exhausted—tomorrow is likely to be remembered as Crime Day!”

He said it accusingly, as if he held the investigator responsible. But Sayn did not respond, for he was a man not without compassion, and Taganall was busy vomiting.

O
ne person awoke to a foreign presence in his apartment on that night without a moon, and another was not asleep, and the cat-burglar called Catwalker was forced to do some running. Up the facade of a building a floor and a half he forced himself as fast as he was able, every second in peril, and all in silence recklessly raced across that roof unlit even by the few visible stars on this night of sky-prowling clouds. His cloth loot-bag hung silently in one hand because it was padded with cotton fluff against the rattle and clink of precious metals and almost by instinct he launched his black-clad self into blackest night to alight on another roof, to smack into an unyielding slab of brick-hard blacker than blackness, and actually bounce off that chimney to fall and roll on the
almost
flat roof, grunting and gasping but holding back any outcry or curse.

And then he was forced to squint down into pitch blackness and pat the roof with both hands in quest of the bag containing tonight’s gleanings, and was on his feet and running again—dodging a second chimney—and again leaping, flying, soaring through moonless darkness under the faint illumination of a few lonesome stars. At last he fastened the bag to his belt, and double-checked the fastening, and began his downward clamber into the narrow space between this building and the next, which was taller.

He had descended past three rows of windows when he froze at the sudden eruption of clamor immediately below: a male shriek, followed by others as well as howls of pain in the same voice, all accompanied by a ferocious bestial snarling. The perilous “route” Catwalker followed down the side of the building was not one that enabled him to go back up. He stayed frozen, clinging to masonry.

Frozen except for his quivering, clinging desperately to masonry, Lone knew what he was hearing, and he did not want to go down. He listened to ripping sounds. And wet sounds. And then a stomach-lurching wet-ripping noise.

He remained hanging there until his fingers gave out, and spasmed, and he fell backward. By that time below him was only silence.

And hard-packed earth, and garbage.

Fortunately, his fall was for the most part broken by the motionless legs of the latest victim of the sklamera.

This time the superb cat-burglar called Catwalker did not try to examine the corpse. He did not even pause, but rolled off the poor fellow’s legs, grunted with pain as he lurched to his feet, and headed for the faint light he saw. He did not walk.

That rapid pace swiftly brought him out of the passageway between two buildings, and into the light of a torch set atilt in a cresset thrusting out from the building on the corner. His heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest as he glanced in each direction, decided, and started moving rapidly up Tranquility Street. He was at the next corner and in the act of crossing there when the blood-splashed and smeared thing of nightmares seemed just to
appear
before him, at a distance of some two bodylengths. It snarled in a low voice. It was definitely humanshaped and definitely female, with long stringy hair like seaweed trailing over its shoulders and chest. With feet well apart and arms bent with horribly long claws poised, it stared.

I am dead,
Lone thought, filling one hand with nearly three feet of steel and the other with a six-pointed star. He dared not turn his back on this horror to run. He had no choice but to match its stare.

“Lone!” a voice called from behind him, and he jerked spastically at the unexpected sound. “Move aside! You’re between us and it!”

Lone was very aware of that fact, but chose not to say so. It was all he could do not to glance behind him. He thought he recognized the voice, but was not sure. He stared into the eyes of the beast, which was no longer snarling but still drooling blood. Now it cocked its hideous head, and the eyes that stared into his seemed to soften.