Shadows of Sanctuary

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  “I miss your bread,” she said to Quartz in their own language. Quartz smiled.

  The meat was hot and untainted by decay. Even Aerie ate with some appetite, though she preferred meat raw.

  Halfway through her meal, Wess slowed down and took a moment to observe the tavern more carefully.

  At the bar, a group suddenly burst into raucous laughter.

  “You say the same damned thing every damned time you turn up in Sanctuary, Bauchle,” one of them said, his loud voice full of mockery. “You have a secret or a scheme or a marvel that will make your fortune. Why don’t you get an honest job—like the rest of us?”

  That brought on more laughter, even from the large, heavyset young man who was being made fun of.

  “You’ll see, this time,” he said. “This time I’ve got something that will take me all the way to the court of the Emperor. When you hear the criers tomorrow, you’ll know.” He called for more wine. His friends drank and made more jokes, both at his expense.

  The Unicorn was much more crowded now, smokier, louder. Occasionally someone glanced towards Wess and her friends, but otherwise they were let alone.

  A cold breeze thinned the odour of beer and sizzling meat and unwashed bodies. Silence fell suddenly, and Wess looked quickly around to see if she had breached some other unknown custom.

  But all the attention focused on the tavern’s entrance. The cloaked figure stood there casually, but nothing was casual about the aura of power and self possession.

  In the whole of the tavern, not another table held an empty place.

  “Sit with us, sister!” Wess called on impulse.

  Two long steps and a shove: Wess’s chair scraped roughly along the floor and Wess was rammed back against the wall, a dagger at her throat.

  “Who calls me “sister”?” The dark hood fell back from long, grey-streaked hair. A blue star blazed on the woman’s forehead. Her elegant features grew terrible and dangerous in its light.

  Wess stared up into the tall, lithe woman’s furious eyes. Her jugular vein pulsed against the point of the blade. If she made a move towards her knife, or if any other friends moved at all, she was dead.

  “I meant no disrespect—” She almost said “sister” again. But it was not the familiarity that had caused offence: it was the word itself. The woman was travelling incognito, and Wess had breached her disguise. No mere apology would repair the damage she had done.

  A drop of sweat trickled down the side of her face. Chan and Aerie and Quartz were all poised on the edge of defence. If Wess erred again, more than one person would die before the fighting stopped.

  “My unfamiliarity with your language has offended you, young gentleman,” Wess said, hoping the tavern-keeper had used a civil form of address, if not a civil tone. It was often safe to insult someone by the tone, but seldom by the words themselves. “Young gentleman,” she said again when the woman did not kill her, “someone has made sport of me by translating ‘frejojan’, ‘sister’.”

  “Perhaps,” the disguised woman said. “What does frejojan mean?”

  “It is a term of peace, an offer of friendship, a word to welcome a guest, another child of one’s own parents.”

  “Ah. ‘Brother’ is the word you want, the word to speak to men. To call a man ‘sister’, the word for women, is an insult.”

  “An insult!” Wess said, honestly surprised.

  But the knife drew back from her throat.

  “You are a barbarian,” the disguised woman said, in a friendly tone. “I cannot be insulted by a barbarian.”

  “There is the problem, you see,” Chan said. “Translation. In our language, the word for outsider, for foreigner, also translates as “barbarian”.” He smiled, his beautiful smile.

  Wess pulled her chair forward again. She reached for Chan’s hand under the table. He squeezed her fingers gently.

  “I meant only to offer you a place to sit, where there is no other.”

  The stranger sheathed her dagger and stared down into Wess’s eyes. Wess shivered slightly and imagined spending the night with Chan on one side, the stranger on the other.

  Or you could have the centre, if you liked, she thought, holding the gaze.

  The stranger laughed. Wess could not tell if the mocking tone were directed outward or inward.

  “Then I will sit here, as there is no other place.” She did so. “My name is Lythande.”

  They introduced themselves, and offered her—Wess made herself think of Lythande as “him” so she would not damage the disguise again—offered him wine.

  “I cannot accept your wine,” Lythande said. “But to show I mean no offence, I will smoke with you.” He rolled shredded herbs in a dry leaf, lit the construction, inhaled from it, and held it out. “Westerly, frejojan.”

  Out of politeness Wess tried it. By the time she stopped coughing her throat was sore, and the sweet scent made her feel lightheaded.

  “It takes practice,” Lythande said, smiling.

  Chan and Quartz did no better, but Aerie inhaled deeply, her eyes closed, then held her breath. Thereafter she and Lythande shared it while the others ordered more ale and another flask of wine.

  “Why did you ask me, of all this crowd, to sit here?” Lythande asked.

  “Because…” Wess paused to try to think of a way to make her intuition sound sensible. “You look like someone who knows what’s going on. You look like someone who might help us.”

  “If information is all you need, you can get it less expensively than by hiring a sorcerer.”

  “Are you a sorcerer?” Wess asked.

  Lythande looked at her with pity and contempt. “You child! What do your people mean, sending innocents and children out of the north!” He touched the star on his forehead. “What did you think this means?”

  “I’ll have to guess, but I guess it means you are a mage.”

  “Excellent. A few years of lessons like that and you might survive, a while, in Sanctuary—in the Maze—in the Unicorn!”

  “We haven’t got years,” Aerie whispered. “We have, perhaps, overspent the time we do have.”

  Quartz put her arm around Aerie’s shoulders, for comfort, and hugged her gently.

  “You interest me,” Lythande said. “Tell me what information you seek. Perhaps I will know whether you can obtain it less expensively—not cheaply, but less expensively—from Jubal the Slavemonger, or from a seer—”At their expressions, he stopped.

  “Slavemonger!”

  “He collects information as well. You needn’t worry that he’ll abduct you from his sitting-room.”

  They all started speaking at once, then fell silent, realizing the futility.

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “We’re looking for someone,” Wess said.

  “This is a poor place to search. No one will tell you anything about any patron of this establishment.”

  “But he’s a friend.”

  “There’s only your word for that.”

  “Satan wouldn’t be here anyway,” Wess said. “If he were free to come here he’d be free to go home. We’d have heard something of him, or he would have found us, or—”

  “You fear he was taken prisoner. Enslaved perhaps.”

  “He must have been. He was hunting, alone. He liked to do that, his people often do.”

  “We need solitude sometimes,” Aerie said.

  Wess nodded. “We didn’t worry about him till he didn’t come home for Equinox. Then we searched. We found his camp, and a cold trail…”

  “We tried to hope for kidnapping,” Chan said. “But there was no ransom demand. The trail was so old—they took him away.”

  “We followed, and we heard some rumours of him,” Aerie said. “But the road branched, and we had to choose which way to go.” She shrugged, but could not maintain the careless pose; she turned away in despair. “I could find no trace…”

  Aerie, with her longer range, had met them after searching all day at each eveni
ng’s new camp, ever more exhausted and more driven.

  “Apparently we chose wrong,” Quartz said.

  “Children,” Lythande said, “children, frejohans—”

  “Frejojani,” Chan said automatically, then shook his head and spread his hands in apology.

  “Your friend is one slave out of many. You could not trace him by his papers, unless you discovered what name they were forged under. For someone to recognize him by a description would be the greatest luck, even if you had an homuncule to show. Sisters, brother, you might not recognize him yourselves, by now.”

  “I would recognize him,” Aerie said.

  “We’d all recognize him, even in a crowd of his own people. But that makes no difference. Anyone would know him who had seen him. But no one has seen him, or if they have they will not say so to us.” Wess glanced at Aerie.

  “You see,” Aerie said, “he is winged.”

  “Winged!” Lythande said.

  “Winged folk are rare, I believe, in the south.”

  “Winged folk are myths, in the south. Winged? Surely you mean…”

  Aerie started to shrug back her cape, but Quartz put her arm around her shoulders again. Wess broke into the conversation quickly.

  “The bones are longer,” she said, touching the three outer fingers of her left hand with the forefinger of her right. “And stronger. The webs between fold out.”

  “And these people fly?”

  “Of course. Why else have wings?”

  Wess glanced at Chan, who nodded and reached for his pack.

  “We have no homuncule,” Wess said. “But we have a picture. It isn’t Satan, but it’s very like him.”

  Chan pulled out the wooden tube he had carried all the way from Kaimas. From inside it, he drew the rolled kidskin, which he opened out on to the table. The hide was carefully tanned and very thin; it had writing on one side and a painting, with one word underneath it, on the other.

  “It’s from the library at Kaimas,” Chan said. “No one knows where it came from. I believe it is quite old, and I think it is from a book, but this is all that’s left.” He showed Lythande the written side. “I can decipher the script but not the language. Can you read it?”

  Lythande shook his head. “It is unknown to me.”

  Disappointed, Chan turned the illustrated side of the manuscript page towards Lythande. Wess leaned towards it too, picking out the details in the dim candlelight. It was beautiful, almost as beautiful as Satan himself. It was surprising how like Satan it was, for it had been in the library since long before he was born. The slender and powerful winged man had red-gold hair and flame-coloured wings. His expression seemed composed half of wisdom and half of deep despair.

  Most flying people were black or deep iridescent green or pure dark blue. But Satan, like the painting, was the colour of fire. Wess explained that to Lythande.

  “We suppose this word to be this person’s name,” Chan said.

  “We cannot be sure we have the pronunciation right, but Satan’s mother liked the sound as we say it, so she gave it to him as his name, too.”

  Lythande stared at the gold and scarlet painting in silence for a long time, then shook his head and leaned back in his chair. He blew smoke towards the ceiling. The ring spun, and sparked, and finally dissipated into the haze.

  “Frejojani,” Lythande said, “Jubal—and the other slavemongers—parade their merchandise through the town before every auction. If your friend were in the coffle, everyone in Sanctuary would know. Everyone in the Empire would know.”

  Beneath the edges of her cape. Aerie clenched her hands into fists.

  Chan slowly, carefully, blankly, rolled up the painting and stored it away.

  This was, Wess feared, the end of their journey.

  “But it might be…”

  Aerie looked up sharply, narrowing her deep-set eyes.

  “Such an unusual being would not be sold at public auction. He would be offered in private sale, or exhibited, or perhaps even offered to the Emperor for his menagerie.”

  Aerie flinched, and Quartz traced the texture of her short-sword’s bone haft.

  “It’s better, children, don’t you see? He’ll be treated decently. He’s valuable. Ordinary slaves are whipped and cut and broken to obedience.”

  Chan’s transparent complexion paled to white. Wess shuddered. Even contemplating slavery they had none of them understood what it meant.

  “But how will we find him? Where will we look?”

  “Jubal will know,” Lythande said, “if anyone does. I like you, children. Sleep tonight. Perhaps tomorrow Jubal will speak with you.” He got up, passed smoothly through the crowd, and vanished into the darkness outside.

  In silence with her friends, Wess sat thinking about what Lythande had told them.

  A well-set-up young fellow crossed the room and leaned over their table towards Chan. Wess recognized him as the man who had earlier been made sport of by his friends.

  “Good evening, traveller,” he said to Chan. “I have been told these ladies are not your wives.”

  “It seems everyone in this room has asked if my companions are my wives, and I still do not understand what you are asking,” Chan said pleasantly.

  “What’s so hard to understand?”

  “What does ‘wives’ mean?”

  The man arched one eyebrow, but replied, “Women bonded to you by law. To give their favours to no one but you. To bear and raise your sons.”

  “ ‘Favours’?”

  “Sex, you clapperdudgeon! Fucking! Do you understand me?”

  “Not entirely. It sounds like a very odd system to me.”

  Wess thought it odd, too. It seemed absurd to decide to bear children of only one gender; and bonded by law sounded suspiciously like slavery. But—three women pledged solely to one man? She glanced across at Aerie and Quartz and saw they were thinking the same thing. They burst out laughing.

  “Chan, Chan-love, think how exhausted you’d be!” Wess said.

  Chan grinned. They often slept and made love all together, but he was not expected to satisfy all his friends. Wess enjoyed making love with Chan, but she was equally excited by Aerie’s delicate ferocity, and by Quartz’s inexhaustible gentleness and power.

  “They’re not your wives, then,” the man said. “So how much for that one?” He pointed at Quartz.

  They all waited curiously for him to explain.

  “Come on, man! Don’t be coy! You’re obvious to everyone—why else bring women to the Unicorn? With that one, you’ll get away with it till the madams find out. So make your fortune while you can. What’s her price? I can pay, I assure you.”

  Chan started to speak, but Quartz gestured sharply and he fell silent.

  “Tell me if I interpret you correctly,” she said. “You think coupling with me would be enjoyable. You would like to share my bed tonight.”

  “That’s right, lovey.” He reached for her breast but abruptly thought better of it.

  “Yet you speak, not to me, but to my friend. This seems very awkward, and very rude.”

  “You’d better get used to it, woman. It’s the way we do things here.”

  “You offer Chan money, to persuade me to couple with you.”

  The man looked at Chan. “You’d best train your whores to manners yourself, boy, or your customers will help you and damage your merchandise.”

  Chan blushed scarlet, embarrassed, flustered, and confused. Wess began to think she knew what was going on, but she did not want to believe it.

  “You are speaking to me, man,” Quartz said, using the word with as much contempt as he had put into ‘woman’. “I have but one more question for you. You are not ill-favoured, yet you cannot get someone to bed you for the joy of it. Does this mean you are diseased?”

  With an incoherent sound of rage, he reached for his knife. Before he touched it. Quartz’s short-sword rasped out of its scabbard. She held its tip just above his belt-buckle. The death she offered
him was slow and painful.

  Everyone in the tavern watched intently as the man slowly spread his hands.

  “Go away,” Quartz said. “Do not speak to me again. You are not unattractive, but if you are not diseased you are a fool, and I do not sleep with fools.”

  She moved her sword a handsbreadth. He backed up three fast steps and spun around, glancing spasmodically from one face to another, to another. He found only amusement. He bolted, through a roar of laughter, fighting his way to the door.

  The tavern-keeper sauntered over. “Foreigners,” he said, “I don’t know whether you’ve made your place or dug your graves tonight, but that was the best laugh I’ve had since the new moon. Bauchle Meyne will never live it down.”

  “I did not think it funny in the least,” Quartz said. She sheathed her short sword. She had not even touched her broadsword. Wess had never seen her draw it. “And I am tired. Where is our room?”

  He led them up the stairs. The room was small and low-ceilinged. After the tavern-keeper left, Wess poked the straw mattress of one of the beds, and wrinkled her nose.

  “I’ve got this far from home without getting lice, I’m not going to sleep in a nest of bedbugs.” She threw her bedroll to the floor. Chan shrugged and dropped his gear.

  Quartz flung her pack into the corner. “I’ll have something to say to Satan when we find him,” she said angrily. “Stupid fool, to let himself be captured by these creatures.”

  Aerie stood hunched in her cloak. “This is a wretched place,” she said. “You can flee, but he cannot.”

  “Aerie, love, I know, I’m sorry.” Quartz hugged her, stroking her hair. “I didn’t mean it, about Satan. I was angry.”

  Aerie nodded.

  Wess rubbed Aerie’s shoulders, unfastened the clasp of her long hooded cloak, and drew it from Aerie’s body. Candlelight rippled across the black fur that covered her, as sleek and glossy as sealskin. She wore nothing but a short thin blue silk tunic and her walking boots. She kicked off the boots, dug her clawed toes into the splintery floor, and stretched.

  Her outer fingers lay close against the backs of her arms. She opened them, and her wings unfolded.

  Only half-spread, her wings spanned the room. She let them droop, and pulled aside the leather curtain over the tall narrow window. The next building was very close.