by Lynn Abbey
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 …”
“Ah!” The scholar made a show of being horrified. “Another request from the impatient boy! This soft package had better contain something of value!”
For once Lone remembered the advice of both his mentor and the Spellmaster, and kept silent.
After a long while that seemed longer, “All right, then,” the other man said, with no sign of contrition. “What else is it you want to beg of me?”
Lone’s head snapped up and in an instant he had reshaped himself into a military posture. “I beg nothing from anyonel” he snapped, and added, “never!”
Heliz Yunz looked startled and more, but did not backstep, either physically or with face or words. “The word ‘never’ negates the previous statement,” he said, as if he expected his meaning to be understood by a youngster who was only just able to read and was barely able to write. “But at any rate … what else is it that you would have of me, Lone?”
Aha! He who is a Lirt called me by name rather than “boy”! “I had hoped you might find out for me anything that might be knowable about a bracelet of gold that looks like this and is this long.”
With that the youth drew a quite passable picture of the long ornament that embraced the forearm of the girl he had rescued from robbery and worse. “It looked like beaten gold,” he told Heliz, who knew this orphan lad with so much attitude did have an excellent idea for such things.
They arranged another meeting or exchange of messages, and parted with the tunic still wrapped and unidentified Damn him, Lone mused. He is always so a Lirt!
After that Lone ambled as if aimlessly, trying to be unobtrusive in looking upward to examine possible targets for a night worker on a moonless night …
In the first night of this month’s disappearance of the moon above the woods outside Sanctuary a weak excuse for a breeze only just rustled a few leaves of the trees. The trees crowded close against the small waterway that crept through the woods. The breath of air was pallid, and no more significant than the small man who sloshed out of the stream. He bore a good-sized woven sack, laden but not full, and a slim pole hand-equipped at one end with two tines about as long as two sections of his longest finger. In the darkness among the trees, his face was undefined and no one could have named the color of his faded old tunic. He wore no leggings, and his legs, short and knotty, streamed water. He carried the sack as if it was middling heavy. It was swollen here and there, and some among those lumps could be seen to move. Clearly this man had spent some hours in the stream, g
igging frogs.
“Looks like you had a good night froggin’, Turgul.”
At the unexpected sound of that seemingly disembodied voice, the man from far Shitellanor jerked as if in response to the sting of an insect. “Name of the shadow god hisself, Borl, you like to scared me out of a year of my life!”
Borl, a large youth with a total of eighteen digits and fewer than twenty years, treated Turgul the Shite to his imitation of an affrighted chicken.
“Now damn it—” Turgul began.
“Aw come on, Turgul,” Borl said amiably. “Didn’t know you didn’t see me, is all. Wasn’t trying to be stealthy, neither. I thought you Shites seen everything of a dark night.”
“I see frogs well enough!”
“Looks like you seen plenty. I’ll clean ’em for a share of the meat.”
Mollified—and outweighed by fifty-something pounds directed by an undeveloped brain unlikely to develop much more—Turgul nodded. “All right. First let’s get out of these blasted woods so we don’t get no more surprises.”
With Borl towering at his side, the frogging Shite resumed his bowlegged gait along the path through the woods. They did not go far before they made camp. There Borl did indeed skin and otherwise prepare the several frogs for cooking before they approached the two men on watch at the gate. The delay was brief and the bribe a heartwarming one to Turgul and Borl; these city-bred men of the watch knew no better than to accept the uneviscerated bodies of four frogs. A few minutes later the friends entered the city, averting their smirking faces. One of the guardsmen made a note of Borl’s name and physical description, with a view toward suggesting the recruitment of such a big fellow.
That was not to be. Once Borl and Turgul finished a savory repast of frog’s legs and a bit of bread, they parted. Borl was ambling happily along with no particular goal in mind when he saw the young woman turn into the narrow, dark street called Borborygma. With no nearby lights or even a moon, the blackness in there was no less than that of a sorcerer’s heart. But the very big fellow named Borl feared little, including mere darkness.
With a little smile on his lips, he followed the sinuous progress of the slender hourglass figure into Borborygma Street. He was discovered there in the morning, not just dead but badly ripped up as by an animal too totally savage and ferocious to be possible within the city … and mutilated in a way that some folk would call unspeakable.
Violent death was far from unknown in Sanctuary. But a killing so spectacular as that of one Borl son of Borl was unusual, and cause for alarm. Was some sort of wild animal loose in the streets? Add in the ghastliness of the mutila tion, and the news spread rapidly. With so many retellings by third- and fifth- and then eighth-party sources, it took next to no time for misinformation and exaggerations to muck up the story. Business took an upward leap in the farmers’ market. Some people were here to hear and exchange gossip, and to speculate, and others to make certain they were well-stocked with food for dinner and need not venture out this night.
Among them was a youth who had done physical harm on no one last night but had gained a few salable items by means dishonest. He heard much about the man he had never known, but nothing at all about the very thin young foreign female he sought. He paid off a short-term debt with coins he had of a changer who asked no questions but was tight as an athlete’s butt, and made gifts to three people. These were jewels, in two cases, and in the third a good dagger in a nice sheath.
The dark sheath was one that Lone had acquired over a year ago; the dagger one he had carried and used since his adoption. He kept the newer and thus less sharpened one he had roached the previous evening, at the same time and in the same third-floor room wherein he picked up the ruby-and-coral earrings and the matching bracelet—which now adorned the ears and wrist of two different persons unlikely ever to be in the same place at the same time.
Late that evening in a room on the third floor of an “unscalable” tenement, he decided not to take anything because it was obvious that the resident had come upon hard times. He descended empty-handed but not unhappy. His feet had just come down on the pave when from the unlit alley to his left he heard the hideous snarling growls of an animal and then a mingling, high-voiced shriek in a human voice. Hair leaped erect on Lone’s arms and nape and he unsheathed a weapon with each hand.
With prickling scalp, he started into absolute blackness.
In two seconds he suffered an attack of intelligence, realizing that the odds strongly favored his immediate death or worse. He decided to wait and see who or what emerged from that obsidian darkness, and sheathed his long blade but kept a firm grip on the dagger and one of his throwing knives. Less than a minute later he heard feet pattering toward him in the alley, and it occurred to him that he’d have been even wiser to have ascended. Then the mad-eyed hideousness with jaws and fangs and claws and streaming hair came hurtling out of the dark. It did not even pause in bowling Lone over, but accomplished that in passing, and raced on.
Lone thought he inflicted a dagger wound, but at the same time as the pavement raised the strawberry of an abrasion on his right arm his head banged into a masonry wall and he and rational thought parted company.
The apparition was of course gone when after a few seconds Lone had got himself together and onto his feet. He bent to pick up his spanking new dagger and saw that the blade was indeed marked with fresh red blood. As he and his staggered brain lurched up the street to the nearest wellcoming light, Lone realized that the thing he had so briefly seen had been an animal that walked quite erect, on two feet. And the hips, and the bilobed chest …
“Among Sanctuary’s many troubles is that the bottom of the bottom keeps getting lower.” Those words of the white mage Strick were a plague inside his head as Lone hurried away from the bloodiest mess he had ever seen.
Before he went into the greasily lit tavern to order a large dark ale, he thought to wipe his blade on a dirty strip of cloth he found just outside the door. Twenty minutes later he and two large men with a torch retraced his steps and this time entered the alley, which naturally enough surrounded the trepid trio with the odor of ammonia. It turned out to be a veritable cul-de-sac, narrowing to a passage that would have turned back a man with a real belly, or an extra-busty woman. The doomed young man who had so foolishly entered it had walked all the way to that area. The mark of his urine was still on the wall, but Lone and his companions were staring down at a lot more blood. And horror that proved too much for the stomachs of two of the three men.
Leaving their vomit behind with the victim’s blood, they fetched him out of the alley without ever glancing at their burden. A burly man in uniform had turned up in the tavern since their departure. In the name of the City Watch, he commandeered the torn old cloak that had long hung on the back wall. No one should have to look at the ghastliness that had been perpetrated on the slim young man who had sought only to relieve his bladder.
Next day Lone met Chance in a venue that some would have considered unlikely for such men: Chiluna’s Green Acre. The place was far from large as an acre, and the only thing green there was the tea. Over a cup apiece, the younger orphan was excited yet carefully quiet in telling the older about how he had found the body of the second murder victim. That did not interfere with their noticing the entrance of two strangers. A brief inquiry led them to the table of the two suspicious-looking patrons, who were instantly wary.
The male newcomer was of average height and burly, with dark brown hair and a small beard of lighter brown and ginger. His tunic was off-white with hem stripes in blue, over darkish blue leggings and a handsome pair of buskins, dark brown and worn. His mantle was short, medium brown, and thrown back. He wore both sword and dagger—but of course everyone bore a dagger, the world’s all-purpose tool. In cut and style, his hair was …just there. This carefully conservative man, the oldest person present, wanted to be one who faded into any background.
He was neither hurried nor reluctant in showing Chance and Lone
the medallion that proclaimed him a representative of the government
“My name is Taran Sayn,” he said crisply. His manner was friendly. “I represent the Sharda. We are investigators in the employ of Judge Nevermind, who is interested in increased citizen safety.”
Lone cocked his head to one side. “Judge Nevermind?”
The bland-looking man shrugged. “It’s just that he is a magistrate, Lone, a member of government. You need to know my name and that I’m with the Sharda, not his name.”
“As you knew mine, already. But—aren’t you Ilsigi?” .
“Native Sanctuarian, yes,” Sayn said, without taking his gaze off Lone’s eyes. “Not all of us in government are Irrune.”
Lone’s head, which had realigned itself, went into cocked mode again. “And you work for an Ilsigi judge?”
“Let’s just say that he is a man who believes that we native Sanctuarians have a right to police and judge ourselves. Never forget that most of the nabobs are of Ilsigi descent. This judge’s goals are in our interest.”
“So,” Lone began slowly after a long moment of reflection, “is knowing the name of such a man.”
Sayn gazed meditatively at him for about the length of time Lone had taken to process the previous information. Then he said, “His name is Elisar.”
“Judge Elisar,”
“Right. Now. I am with the Sharda, as I said, and the reason I am here is to ask you questions, Lone, and instead all I have done is answer yours.”