Shadowspawn (Thieves' World Book 4)

by Andrew J Offutt

  He nodded, saluted her with the mug, and drank.

  “I just wanted you to know, Mignue. I thought of this last night. I mean, it isn’t as if you can come along and watch me work.”

  She sat gazing at him, nodding, on and on. At last she seemed to awake as from a trance, and stood.

  “I’m…glad to know, darling. It’s scary and it’s wonderful. I can’t believe some sorcery or god isn’t involved. I’ve also been shocked half out of my skin. I’m going to bed.”

  He grinned. “Better not be planning on going right to sleep!”

  *

  It seemed inconsequential and mundane next day, when Anorislas advised that he had sold another horse, and paid Hanse eleven-and-twenty-five. He went away unable to understand why Hanse showed no joy or much gratitude or indeed much in the way of emotion at all.

  Hanse was jittery that night, and Mignureal oddly silent. No, he would not eat, not before he — went out. Mignureal found that she was not at all interested in food. He alternated trying to rest on the bed and pouncing up, to exercise.

  As Firaqa grew darker, so did Mignureal’s mood.

  “Are you taking Notable?”

  He looked at her, hoping she had something to offer. Maybe there was no danger after all, he thought. He nodded.

  “Aye, I think I will.” He rolled and stood up from the bed again. “It’s about time I went over for the horse.”

  “You’re going in those clothes?”

  “I’ll change after I get the horse.”

  “Oh.”

  He clasped his good cloak about him and turned. She was pasted against him in a moment. Yet she still had nothing to tell him; no Seeing had come upon her. With the delighted Notable, the parcel of clothing and the other one containing the substitute figurine, Hanse went out the door. He had waited and waited, hoping she would See something; now he would be a bit late.

  Well, they’ll wait for the professional!

  “Hanse.”

  With a sensation of spiders running a relay race up his back in response to that strange voice, Hanse turned back.

  “Are you taking gloves, Hanse?”

  He nodded, staring at her and her large round eyes. Mignureal did not even appear to be at home in there, behind those staring eyes. He had witnessed this before, of course, and he recognized the phenomenon. That did not mean that he would ever be accustomed to it, comfortable with the inexpressible eeriness of it: The Seeing had come upon her.

  Then it occurred to him that seeing and Seeing were not the same. “Aye,” he said.

  “Good. Do not touch the spikes on the wall with bare hands, or the pearl-white cat, either. Oh — how interesting! Perias the Changer is taking dinner with Corstic tonight.”

  He stood staring, and watched Mignureal come back into her own eyes. Her voice was perfectly natural:

  “Forget something, darling?”

  He decided to tell her later. After. He shook his head, and started to turn away.

  “Be careful, darling!”

  “I will. I will, Mignue.”

  Notable stayed close as they walked through nighted Firaqa to the Green Goose. Hanse could find no significance in Perias’ presence at dinner; after they ate both he and Corstic would be going to the Council meeting anyhow. Would have gone already, in fact. The other part was easy: the spikes and the figurine must be coated with a contact poison. Now he must hurry, to warn Thuvarandis and the others. He speeded up to a trot, which was fine with Notable.

  Khulna’s boy Tip was snoozing in the stable, but roused himself swiftly to help Hanse bridle and saddle the big grey. Hanse sent him into the inn for a piece of fruit; any fruit. By the time the lad was back from a mission that was a ruse, Hanse had changed clothing in the horse’s stall and re-covered himself with the cloak. Now it concealed his working clothes.

  Another copper coin found itself into Tip’s eager hand. With Notable clasped to him atop the clothing parcel, Hanse rode away.

  The screaming cry came two blocks later, and it was not Tip: “Hanse!”

  His heart and stomach lurched, not quite in unison and hardly smoothly. He hauled in the horse and waited trembling while Mignureal came running. She carried Rainbow in her arms, he saw. When she reached him he’d have seen it even in less moonlight: the eyes. It had happened again.

  Hanse shuddered as those round, glassy eyes stared up at him.

  “Hanse: Something has happened! Do Not Go! Stay…outside…the…wall.” And then, a moment later: “Hanse? Whatever am I doing out here on the stree — oh! It Happened?”

  He nodded, sliding his fingers into her hair. He swallowed. “Aye. You bade me keep Notable with me and wear my gloves. Please go and wait at the Green Goose, will you? It’s only two blocks, and you’re a long way from the apartment.”

  “All — all right, darling. I will. Oh!”

  Completely out of character, Rainbow had pounced from her arms onto the horse’s broad back, behind the saddle. The animal started and Hanse had to cling with both legs while actually putting muscle into dragging on the reins. The horse half reared, then settled and was still. He shook his head, rattling the metal of his harness.

  “Rainbow! You bad — ”

  “Don’t scold, Mignue. We both know she’s no more a natural cat than Notable. But no, I’m afraid you can’t come along, Rainbow.” Hanse twisted around and lifted the calico, which did not resist going back into Mignureal’s arms.

  “Be — be careful, darling.”

  “I will. See you later.”

  He sat there on the horse and watched her all the way to the end of the block. Then she made the turn toward the inn, and Hanse released a long breath. With a glance up at the moon, he twitched his heels. Despite her warning, he had to go. He had to try to warn the others. The first part was the hardest: the necessity of obeying the law all the way to the gate, by keeping to a sedate walk in the centre of the street. His mount no more wanted to do that than Hanse did. It seemed to take forever to reach the northward gate.

  “Going to give this boy a good run,” he said as casually as he could, passing the bored sentinels.

  “Do him a lot of good, too! Good-lookin’ animal! Bet he can go like the wind!”

  Hanse kicked, bent forward, and said, “Haiya!” The grey hurtled away like an arrow from a bow, and Hanse’s cloak nearly strangled him. He grabbed it at the neck but made no effort to slow the animal until he was starting up Town Hill, and then only long enough to roll up the cloak and secure it to the saddle. Then he jerked his heels.

  “Want to run uphill, big boy? Haiya!”

  The horse went up the hill road as if it were a plain.

  Along the way four riderless horses came galloping at them from the opposite direction. They broke around Hanse and his mount without slowing that which was obviously a headlong bolting flight. He knew then that Mignureal had Seen true again, and that he was not going to be in time. He spent several hundred feet just slowing his mount to a trot.

  Shadowspawn saw and heard the crackling, popping, dancing horror before he reached his goal.

  A tall torch blazed atop the wall surrounding Corstic’s estate, and another sent flames high from the lawn just outside the mansion. And they were not, Hanse saw, natural torches…

  “Oh, oh gods, oh gods,” he muttered, and could not have raised his voice had it been his own body ablaze there atop the wall, rather than the writhing, fiery form of Marll.

  As to the huge torch on the lawn near the big house and so clearly illuminating it — that was Corstic’s former assistant cook. Shorty was a lot taller, as a pillar of yellow and white flame. It lit the home of Corstic the mage far more brightly than it should have done, and the mansion seemed all aflicker in that unnatural light.

  Corstic had found out. Corstic was at home, and exacting a ghastly price of the plotters.

  Somewhere on the spacious green grounds someone was screaming, screaming, enough to make Hanse want to sob. It was a man he heard, screaming pit
eously, on and on in the voice of a woman. Corstic was exacting from him the price of conspiracy, of invasion of his grounds. Corstic, all of whose servants and dogs were presumably asleep. Corstic, master-mage of Firaqa. Compared to him and his powers, the invaders were helpless children. To him, they must be as annoying crickets at night were to Shadowspawn.

  The heart-wrenching sound of shrill male screaming rose even above the crackle and pop of the human torches and the ceaseless roar of the nearer one.

  And gods, gods, O Allfather Ils; now Hanse could smell it even as he heard the bursting of blisters of fat: roasting human flesh.

  A ghastly voice from above his head gasped out words, wetly: “Runn…Pro…fession’l…”

  Shadowspawn glanced up just as a thigh-thick branch cracked loudly amid leafy sounds as of a tree in a high wind. With only a glance up he was somehow able to croak “haiya!” as the branch broke off and came hurtling down at him with a leafy rush. Impaled and swinging hideously from the down-rushing bough was Thuvarandis, transpierced by the largest spear imaginable. And yet Thuvarandis, horribly, monstrously, was not dead. His wound was awful. His eyes were worse.

  The big grey horse bolted in instant response to the vocal command. Hanse could only cling to the saddle while a spitting Notable clung to his thigh, but Hanse never felt the imbedded claws.

  The human pillars of flame continued to blaze high, illuminating most of the grounds. They crackled constantly, and the odour grew while Hanse’s empty stomach lurched. He gagged and retched helplessly.

  He got the horse to a stop again. He was still close to the wall, but farther south, now. He soon wished he hadn’t stopped the grey here, for hanging limply over the wall a few feet away under more towering old trees, was another man. Ils’ breath, could any poison work that fast, to arrest and slay him in the act of climbing over? Not four feet away from Shadowspawn the body seemed to tremble, and then with a whoomp and a rush of air that flapped the horse’s mane, the dead man burst into flame.

  For an instant Hanse saw the corpse swell, saw bubbles rise, and then he was hearing their pop-pop-pop amid the crackle of wetted flame. A moment later fire went leaping twenty feet straight up, white and yellow tongues dancing, and Hanse wrestled the horse around to rush back to Thuvarandis. A sideward glance showed him the figure of a man limned in a well-lighted upper window; the window next to the one by which he had meant to enter. The man’s hands rose, his arms spread…

  Branches began cracking loudly as they tore themselves from trees and hurled themselves through the air. They rushed at such speed that he could hear their passage, in a series of middle-range whooshes. Leaves brushed his face, racing past on tom-off boughs.

  Hanse forgot Thuvarandis; the poor miserable creature could not be saved anyhow, but Hanse had thought he might slay him to end the unnatural suffering Corstic imposed. He forgot the unknown screamer, forgot the porcelain cat and the loot he had dreamed of. Yanking his mount around, Shadowspawn galloped pell-mell down the winding road and off the hill. Somehow rushing branches missed him. He did not slow the grey horse until he could see the city gates. The torches there made his backbone crawl, but they were the same natural ones he had noted as he rode out. In the open night air they had no odour, and yet he still fancied that he could smell the stench of roasting human flesh.

  Somehow he remembered to draw his cloak about him, to hide his blacks. Coiled and quivering against his crotch, Notable did not at all mind being covered up.

  The guards jovially commented on the obvious fact that the horse had been well run, and helpfully reminded his rider that he’d better wipe him down in this cool night air, once he removed the saddle. Hanse rode on, nodding, unable to speak although his mouth was loosely open. His stomach was still lurching.

  Tip saw to the care of the grey, receiving more coppers than he had previously seen at one time, and somehow Mignureal and the shaking, staring Hanse made it home. The cats stayed very close indeed.

  Only after she had helped him get out of his clothing did they discover the blood all down Hanse’s thigh. Yet there was no way he could even think of chastising Notable; had Shadowspawn possessed claws, the grey horse might have been half skinned by the time he succeeded in quitting that hill of horror.

  Hanse slept badly, curled and shivering and mumbling from time to time, while Mignureal held him and stained the bedclothes with her tears. His arm dangled over the side of the bed. It touched the red fur of a large cat, also curled tightly and ashiver, even in sleep. Mignureal could not separate hand and cat, not for long. She gave up, and held her man.

  *

  Next day a numb Hanse learned that Perias the Changer had taken dinner with Corstic the previous night, and had been stricken and fallen dead on the spot. Corstic had discovered a plot involving an apprentice cook, and others. Now Corstic and Arcala were accusing each other; Perias had been Arcala’s business associate. Corstic had not gone to the meeting of the Council, but had heroically remained at home, alone amid unnaturally sleeping servants, to combat the plot and the invading plotters, with great success.

  What had they been after? Why, his very life, what else?

  False, Hanse thought. They — we sought only to steal a porcelain cat, monster! And he rushed home to find new horror.

  Aye, Perias’ name was missing from the list, and another of the silver Rankan coin was gone.

  But only Perias’ name was missing, and only one coin was gone.

  The names that remained on the list were Elturas, and Thuvarandis.

  Ah no, O Ils my father no, no! The man had an entire tree-branch all the way through his body and hung there from it; a branch the size of my thigh! He cannot be alive!

  And yet the tall thin man with the white hair had to be alive — or not dead, at any rate. Not quite. His name remained on the list. Only one coin was gone. It corresponded with the name and the life and the death of Perias. Somehow, sorcerously and horribly, Corstic had to be keeping Thuvarandis alive.

  And not, Hanse thought, reeling and feeling the urge to vomit, to nurse the poor wight back to health, for that cannot be done! The monster keeps him alive to torture him…

  …and doubtless to question him. How long, before a living dead man gasped the word Shadowspawn, and described the man who wore that name? How long, before Corstic translated that into a foreigner; a southern foreigner named Hanse?

  How lucky Malingasa was, to have been separated from the incursion only the day before!

  *

  That night Hanse broke a thirty-hour fast with bread and chicken, fruit and beer. Knowing he could never rest again, he was thinking about it, pondering a future without sleep, when he fell asleep. He slept, truly slept as if he would never awaken and could never be awakened — until the night and his slumber were split by a high-pitched sound loud enough to bring out Firaqa’s volunteer fire fighters blocks away.

  Hanse came awake as he always did: fully, and ready to face demons. This time he awoke with Notable’s yowl still ringing in his ears. His first action could have been considered strange, for the loner Shadowspawn: he shoved Mignureal violently and tumbled her out of bed. Immediately he flopped the other way, and came up in a second with a knife in each hand.

  At the same time someone cried out. Hanse saw him only dimly: the dark outline of a man staggering about the room, flailing as if fighting a ghost.

  “Hanse!”

  That was Mignureal, and Hanse made a reassuring noise. The intruder was not fighting with a ghost, unless he was a hunchback who was not bent; that unsightly hump on the dimly-seen prowler’s back had to be a beer-drinking, attack-trained watch-cat.

  Hanse dropped both knives. Naked, he hurried to the staggering male figure. It had both hands up over its shoulders, striving to tear off the big red cat trying to eat holes in his back. Hanse stepped on flat, cold steel, and shuddered. He knew what that was. Putting out a hand, he found a face. With balled fist he struck it as hard as he could. A wave of pain hit his hand and whippe
d up his arm. He cursed.

  The invader, that cliché of a shadowy figure, grunted and fell like a dropped sack of grain.

  “Hanse?”

  “Get a lamp lit, Mignureal. Notable’s just saved our lives from a prowler with a sword.”

  “Prowler?” Her voice still came from the floor where he had sent her so violently, to save her.

  “Assassin, then. Hired murderer. Light the lamp, Mignue! Notable? It’s done. Good, marvellous boy, Notable. Now let him go while he can still talk to us.”

  Notable must have relinquished his needle-toothed grip, since he was able to say “Raar-rr-rrr,” or something very close. He kept it up, “rr-rr-r-r-r-rr,” sitting on the floor close to the fallen intruder. The baleful stare of those big green eyes looked positively hungry. Hanse was moving unerringly in the darkness, fetching several hundred feet of silken line, an unintended gift from Thuvarandis. He made a good job of immobilizing the intruder’s wrists, even before Mignureal brought the lamp alive.

  Hanse gazed down at Malingasa.

  He chewed his lip for a moment, staring at the man, before he took the line around his ankles a few times and knotted it. While he checked the bonds on Malingasa’s wrists, Hanse identified him to Mignureal. Having hurriedly donned her robe, she sat on the floor with her legs tucked. Rainbow walked onto her thighs and settled between them. Mignureal began stroking her absently. Only Hanse saw how Rainbow glared at the man on the floor. Then he, Mignureal, and both cats jumped when the knock sounded on the door. Hanse went, taking two knives and pulling a cloak around himself; not the black one.

  He edged open the door to face the old cooper who, with his wife, shared the floor with them. Mignureal heard Hanse telling the fellow how lucky they all were; they’d had a prowler but Notable had attacked him and frightened the poor devil right back out the window. Their fellow tenant went away saying he felt more secure, knowing of Notable’s presence.

  About the time Hanse had the door closed he heard footsteps ascending the stairs, but then he heard their neighbour relating the story to the landlord’s wife. She came and knocked anyhow. Hanse talked very quietly, telling her that Mignureal had already returned to sleep. Oh yes, they were fine, both he and she and “those darling kitties.” And once again he closed and secured the door. He returned to the bedroom to find Malingasa awake and staring up at him. Hanse squatted quickly.