Read Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune Online
Authors: Lynn Abbey
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Short Stories, #Media Tie-In
“What did we see?” said the Irrune warrior. “We saw that poor woman use the cursed words, and fall into hell!”
“You goaded her,” said the gray man, softly.
“Goaded,” picked up the warrior. “You goaded her into using the cursed words! And now she’s lost as well.”
“She’s not lost,” said Heliz, “merely misplaced.” He turned toward the man in gray. “You can bring her back now.”
Gothal scowled, “What do you mean?”
“Misdirection,” said Heliz. “Street-corner magic. Everyone was watching Big Minx, but I was watching the rest of you. And your lips were moving.”
The others were silent. Lumm hefted his bung-hammer. The warriors’ hands trailed toward their blades. The ashenfaced S’danzo gripped the knife tightly. The gray bureaucrat kept one hand on the table, the other in the pocket of his own robes. The man was too calm, Heliz thought, and with that realization, all the pieces fit into place.
“Words were involved,” said Heliz. “But not hers. Yours. A spell? A trigger word? A mantra? It doesn’t matter. Here’s what happened: I think you made a grab for her, and one or more of her insults struck a little too close to home. So you decided to get vengeance. That was very stupid.”
The gray-robed man gripped something tightly in his pocket and shouted his words this time. His phrases were alien and mystic, but Heliz had heard worse, and he threw himself to one side as the pit to hell opened beneath his feet.
Before he hit the ground, Heliz shouted, “Lumm! Keep the hole open!”
Heliz twisted as he fell, slamming a chair aside as he landed. The linguist’s shin and thigh rang from the impact, but he stood up quickly, and saw that the barrel-maker had been ready. His long-handled bung-hammer reached across the width of the sudden pit and hooked against the far end. Lumm strained to keep the pit from snapping shut on him. Ravadar, the big Irrune warrior, joined him, leaning onto the hammer, which was already starting to bend under the force trying to shut the pit again.
The other two Irrune swordsmen were at the sides of the pit, reaching down into it.
The gray man pulled something golden and roughly spheroid from his pocket, and held it before him. The object had runes carved on it. Only Heliz would notice the runes at a time like this; they displayed fluid curves, intriguingly similar to the ancient Yenizedi alphabet.
Gothal snarled the alien words again, and Heliz danced to one side, almost tangling himself up in another heavy chair. The linguist pushed it aside, and the chair fell into a brimstone-scented pit and disappeared when the hole closed over it a half-second later.
The Irrune were pulling the two Minxes out of the pit. Lumm and the big warrior leaned into the hammer, the haft of which now arched like a bow from the pressure.
“What was it?” said Heliz, taunting the spell-caster, his words gasping. His chest was tight and his leg throbbing, but he needed to keep Gothal’s attention on him and not the others. “Which of the insults got under your skin? Pudknocking bastard? Toading shitesucker? Misbegotten foulsnatch ? Which one is most accurate?”
Heliz gave a false laugh. “I know—small-codded frograper! That was it, correct?”
The gray man snarled inhuman words, and Heliz took three steps backward. The table in front of him disappeared, taking a platter of ceramic mugs into the abyss.
There was nothing else between him and the gray spell-caster. The cluttered tavern floor had been cleared by suddenly appearing, suddenly disappearing chasms. The women were almost out of the first pit. The force trying to close it had bent the haft of the hammer almost double.
Heliz needed a weapon. Anything would do. He remembered the heavy bronze tablet in his breast pocket. He smiled and casually reached his hand into the pocket over his heart—
His fingers closed on empty space.
The linguist looked around furiously. The bronze tablet must have fallen from his pocket in all the dancing around. It could be anywhere by now, including at the bottom of one of the vanished pits.
Gothal the Gray smiled. Sweat streamed down the side of the bureaucrat’s face in broad rivulets. Whatever magic he was using strained him. His face was in a rictus grin, but he knew he had Heliz trapped.
Heliz started to say, “Before you do anything rash …”
The gray man opened his mouth to conjure, but for a second nothing came out. Then a trickle of blood appeared at one corner of his mouth, and his eyes went glassy and as gray as the rest of him.
Then, slowly, Gothal started to deflate, his knees going and his body falling backward. He twisted as he fell, and Heliz saw a thin S’danzo knife sticking out between his shoulder blades. He gripped the golden spheroid tightly as he collapsed—
And toppled over the edge of the first and last pit. He descended into hell.
Lumm let out a warning shout and the haft of the bung-hammer finally snapped under the eldritch pressure. Pieces of kiln-dried wood shot across the common room and imbedded themselves in the far wall. The head of the hammer was lost with the gray mage when the hole snapped shut. The entire floor roiled like an oil-filled wineskin, and then stabilized again.
Heliz let out a sigh, this time of relief, and dropped down onto a chair. Unfortunately, the chair he thought was there wasn’t, and he fell, ass over shoulders against the wall, and knocked himself out cold.
M
uch of the room had been restored, minus a few tables and chairs, when Heliz came to. The images of the Minxes’ faces, one wide and bovine, the other thin and vulpine, swam in front him.
He raised a hand to swat them off like bats, and they retreated a few steps. Lumm was nearby, as was the young S’danzo. Heliz still could not discern the youth’s gender, but he/she seemed greatly shaken by the events.
Lumm the staver gave a weary smile and said, “How did you know?”
“I didn’t,” said the linguist weakly. “I figured that if it was a one-time thing, there would be no hope for her. Things like that do happen around here, you know. But if it were something that could happen again, there would be three types of people who would still be here. The first were those who hadn’t seen it and wanted to see if it would happen.” He looked at the youth and received a hesitant nod in return.
“The second were people who thought they had the answers.” Heliz waved a hand toward the warriors, who had already opened the bar and were celebrating. “That lot picked up the story about the curse early, helping to clear everyone out But then they liked being experts so much, they hung around to tell anyone they could. The third group that would hang about …”
“Would be those responsible,” said Lumm.
Heliz nodded. “I think it was a magical amulet or something. Foreign, probably from Yenized, though it used an older language. Needed a phrase to activate it Such a device would be like a spell but with one word missing. When the word was in place, it opened the hole. A hole into another place, warmer, but not nearly as warm as the various hells are supposed to be. The little one angered him, so he opened a pit under her. Then he had to do it a second time to the big one to keep his story intact. He was waiting for everyone to leave so he could open the hole and probably pull them out, hungry and tired and maybe unconscious. You knew him?” Heliz asked the women.
Little Minx gave a shrug. Big Minx shook her head. Lumm said, “So the amulet was like a key?”
Heliz ran a hand along his head, trying to dispel the fuzziness in his mind. “If it was, we’ve locked the key in with him. That means he’s going to get hungry and thirsty and unconscious fairly quickly, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Least of all him.”
“Then you knew it was him,” said Lumm.
“I knew that your Irrune warrior could not think up something like this on his own,” said the linguist. “His eyes moved toward the gray man when I pressed him for details. And I knew that Gothal was hiding something—he wrote exactly what I told him, but his handwriting was much more careful than what he had scrawled on the floor. But other than that, no, I was just throwing accusations around and hoping that something hit.”
To Big Minx he added, “Sorry to have put you in danger.” Heliz knew he didn’t mean it and thought she knew it as well.
Big Minx held out something. “This is yours, right?” she said. “Onoe the kitchen girl found it.”
It was the bronze tablet. It was an execration text, heaping curse upon curse to the wicked in five languages. Yet none of the curses were as colorful as those the Minxes had used earlier. And one of the scripts he hadn’t quite recognized looked very much like these curving runes on the Gray Mage’s amulet …
Heliz allowed himself a smile. At least something worthwhile came out of dueling with a sorcerer in the Vulgar Unicorn.
“More good news,” said Lumm. “The young ladies are most appreciative of what we did, what
you
did, for them.”
The two women were back, flanking the linguist.
“We have a place,” said Little Minx, leaning forward.
“Belonged to a friend,” said Big Minx, leaning forward as well.
“He had to leave town,” said Little Minx, giggling.
“We could use a man around,” said Big Minx, smirking.
“And you’re welcome to stay as well,” said Little Minx, brushing against one side.
“You might be cute to have around,” said Big Minx, brushing against the other.
“If you put a little muscle on,” said Little Minx, pressing tighter.
“And started dressing like a real man,” said Big Minx, pressing tighter still.
Crushed between the two women, Heliz thought,
I’m in hell. But given a choice, it is one of the more pleasant hells.
Diana L. Paxson and Ian Grey
S
omething is rustling … wood grinds … impending pressure weighs on the air. A girl sits in her bed, knuckles white as she clutches worn sheets to her chest.
“Taran?” she whispers, as shadows shift about the room.
On the wall a mask of a face is smiling, white as ivory, painted hair twining to either side. Its eyes cast desperately about the room and perspiration beads its brow. But still—it smiles. The girl wraps the blankets around herself more tightly.
“Taran?” she whispers again, knowing even as she speaks that he is far far away. From the face on the wall comes a noise as if teeth are grinding, and then a girlish giggle.
Water leaks in beneath the windowsill. Beyond it, the girl sees fish swimming through dim sunlight filtered through endless blue. The grinding noise grows louder, and the face on the wall, still smiling, looks afraid. A body floats up to the window, unblinking, hair a corona of reddish-blond, its skin peeling and green.
“
Taran!
” the girl screams, “
TA
…”
“ … RAN!” Sula rolled upright suddenly, her heart pounding sharply. Slowly she recollected who and where she was, and
when. Another nightmare,
she thought angrily.
Is there no end to them?
The gray light of the hour before dawn filtered through the window. She got out of bed, draping a shawl across her shoulders, and peered out. In the murk little could be seen. It didn’t matter—even the reassurance that it was only the sleeping city, and not that endless expanse under water, was enough to let her heartbeat slow.
She could still hear a faint grinding noise. She’d like to think it was simply the wind pushing against the inn, or perhaps a guest’s thunderous snoring, but after the last few weeks she knew better. An uninvited guest had come to the Phoenix, and its presence filled the inn like the stench of a dead rat in the wall. None of them knew what it was or how it had come there, but for the past month it had persistently driven out every guest her family had taken in, and she kept having the same dreams.
It was really too bad, when they had begun doing well enough to start making repairs and restoring the house to some of its former glory. The carved cabinet that stood now in the dining room, for instance, was just the thing, said her mother, to give it a touch of class. It had come from a ship that had grounded on the Seaweal reefs a few months ago. The purchase had taken a good bite out of their savings, and now there were no guests to make it up again.
Why Sula was the only one who seemed to be having the dreams, she did not know. The Presence subjected the rest of the inn’s inhabitants to waking torments—thumping at odd hours, cold spots by doors, blood seeping through the walls … . It was enough to frighten all but the most stalwart souls into a hasty departure. There was magic in her family, but until recently, she’d thought her twin brother Taran had been the only one with a sensitivity to the supernatural in her generation.
Was this some kind of sending from Taran? It seemed unlikely. When they were little they had been so close they hardly needed words. She shivered as a memory of using that silent communication to escape a squad of Dyareelans hunting for stray children tried to surface and was suppressed again. But the stresses of puberty had driven them apart, and besides, Taran was far from here. She had not expected she would miss him so.
Last spring her restless brother had signed on as a caravan guard.
He
had said he wanted to travel to Ranke to see their father’s homeland. Their mother said he’d just lost his head over that Rankan woman they’d rescued, but exposing Taran’s real motive for traveling had only strengthened his resolve. Would he ever return? He’d been gone less than six months, but it felt much longer.
Sula heard a creaking from the bed in the next room as her mother turned over. Soon Latilla would be up, badgering the rest of them to get on with the day. If she too had trouble sleeping she would never let them know. When the first manifestations had occurred, Latilla had announced that this was their home. They had survived the Dyareelans and a dozen other external horrors, and she was not about to let a common domestic spook scare her off now.
Holding to that thought, Sula twisted her fair hair into a knot, lit the candle that sat by her bedside, and carried it into the dark hallway, keeping her eyes averted from the pale face that smiled at her from the wall. Its tortured gaze followed her until the light of her candle was gone.