by Lynn Abbey
“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.
The 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 an
d 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.
By 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 sometime. 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?
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 no
t. 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.