Shadows of Sanctuary

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  Darous, who saw nothing, sensed the essence of this change and kept himself to other halls.

  The basilisks, whose cold eyes saw very well, writhed scaly-lithe away in haste, outstared and overwhelmed.

  Chapter 5

  NOT MANY WOMEN came to the Unicorn, not many at least of the elevated sort, and this one took a table to herself and held it. One of the Unicorn’s muddled regulars brushed by, and leaned close, and offered to sit down … but a long hand from beneath those black robes waved an idle and disinterested dismissal. A ring glinted there, a silver serpent, and the bully’s bleared eyes stared at that, at immaculate long nails, into dark almond eyes beneath the shadowy hood. And a fog of alcohol seemed to grow thicker then, so that he forgot all the wittiness he had meant to say, forgot for a moment to close his mouth. A second wave of the thin, olive-skinned hand and he forgot everything and stumbled away in confusion.

  “Acolyte,” Cappen Varra thought in his own counsel, slouched on a bench in the nook nearest the back door. There was somewhat of chaos in the Unicorn of late, a certain lack of the authority which had held the peace, and that sort moved in, cheap muscle. But the woman—that was something extraordinary, like the Unicorn before; a woman, a stranger in the neighbourhood… He was intrigued by the dark robes and the fineness of them, and his fingers moved restlessly on the moisture-ringed tabletop, thinking of a song, fingering imaginary strings of the harp he had pawned (again) and thinking—oddly—on Hanse Shadowspawn, in another and quite irrelevant train of thought, as Hanse had ridden his mind all day. Sjekso gone, Hanse vanished utterly, and night falling outside … Hanse was up to no good, it was certain. There had been neither sight nor sound of him all day long and certain whispers passed in the Unicorn, with more and more credibility: of revenge, of Hanse, about the likelihood of survival of one Mradhon Vis—or Hanse, should the two meet. And about a certain blind man who had found his way without aid into the Unicorn and out again, with Hanse in tow… a blind man and no beggar, for all his looks—but a man of darker rumour.

  It was curious business, and more than mildly unpleasant. Cappen was not sanguine. Hanse stalking Vis—it was quite unlikely. Hanse was all temper and bluster. If anyone was doing the stalking it was likeliest to be Vis, and Hanse was ill-advised to have prodded that surly-countenanced bastard … far more trouble than Hanse really wanted, that was sure. Likely it was Hanse in hiding, if Vis had not yet got him. Cappen picked up his cup again, and of a sudden his eyes hooded and while his hand carrying his cup to his lips never faltered, the sip he took was slow and studied: he watched a second man make attempt on the lady’s table.

  And that was Mradhon Vis himself… who went up quietly, and met no rebuff at all. The lady lifted her face and her eyes to him—a face certainly worth a song, although a dark and sombre one. And when her eyes lit on Mradhon Vis, very quietly the lady got to her feet and in Vis’s still silent company… walked towards the back door of the tavern. Only a few heads turned, of those at the other tables, and those only casually. There was at the same time the faintest of pricklings at Cappen’s nape, a feeling he knew: he touched the amulet at his throat, a silver coiled serpent… a gift, a protection against spells, more efficacious than most priest-blessed gimcrack tokens … under its own terms. He saw, with a touch of unease the greater because no one else in the room seemed to see … how Mradhon Vis and his dark companion moved, with common purpose and peculiar menace.

  Strangeness enough progressed in Sanctuary … deaths which made a man naturally think on protections of the sorcerous kind, and to be glad of them if he had them, because where the powerful died, wizardry was about, selective of its victims thus far, but not—perhaps—exclusive of them. There was Sjekso Kinzan, who had been no one. Cappen wondered did such protection as he possessed … protect or mark him; and as the lady and Mradhon Vis came past his table by the door—

  A moment Cappen was looking up and the lady looked down at him, more familiar in that stare than he would have liked. The prickling about the amulet became strong indeed while he stared, lost in those dark eyes with a sense of deadly peril, of his whole life resting loose and endangered, as if some small nudge on anyone’s pan might tumble it. “You’re beautiful,” he murmured, because three truths was the rule of the amulet if it was to work at all—”You’re dangerous and foreign here.”

  She lingered, and reaching down picked up his cup where it sat; lilted it, sipped and set it down again, all with an eerie hint of humour or menace flaunted at him, at him who alone in the room but Mradhon Vis—or was he exempt?—Alone of all the others,

  Cappen stared back at her with his mind clear and with knowledge, with something gut-wrenching telling him that everything about this woman was askew.

  She smiled at him, a parting of the lips on white teeth, a flash of dark eyes, an impression that she admired what she saw… and all the fineness he kept so studiously, his elegance, different from others about him, his talents, his—if streetworn—finery … was suddenly perilous to him, marking him out among all the rest. And most of all… she knew he resisted her.

  She left then, swept out of the door which Mradhon Vis held open, a gust of wind and a sudden thud of the door closing. Cappen wanted wine… but his hand stopped short of the cup she had just set down again, the metal she had had her lips to and the wine her mouth had tasted. He pushed back from the table and the bench scraped loudly over the noise of the other patrons. He hesitated, looking at the door which led out to the backways, not wanting to go out there, in the gathering dark.

  But Mradhon Vis, linked with that, and Sjekso cold dead with no mark on him; and Hanse outright disappeared, hunting Mradhon Vis, as all the Maze surmised …

  Hanse had involved himself in something which was likely to be the death of him, and what concern that was to Cappen Varra was unclear to Cappen himself, only that he had drunk with Hanse of late, with a short and lately successful thief and ruffian who had wanted—almost pathetically—to acquire style, who spent most that came into his hands on the finer things, a cloak—oh gods! that cloak!—Cappen’s aristocratic soul shuddered. But of the unassuming ruffians in the lot, of what quality there was to be had in the Maze, in Hanse there existed at least the hankering after something else.

  The business had marked Hanse down—and now stopped and stared at himself. It was always safer, he reckoned, to walk at a thing than to have it walking up at his back—later and unforeseen. Cappen opened the door carefully, went out into the backways, his hand on his rapier hilt, recalling that Sjekso had used the same door last night. But there was only the dark outside, amid the litter of old barrels and used bottles. The woman in black had vanished, and Vis with her, vanished, and in what direction Cappen was in no wise certain.

  ****

  PATIENCE WAS REWARDED. Vis, by the gods, and this Ischade … in company; and Hanse crouched lower in the shadows of the alley, a chill up his back, his fingers rubbing at the well-polished hilt of his left boot knife. That promised a revenge within his own grasp: so Yorl wanted the woman, and if Yorl settled with her, then Vis went in the same bargain. Hanse evened his breathing, calmed himself with wild hopes, first of getting out of this Yorl business and then of having Yorl to settle Vis—the means by which the street might be safe again for Hanse Shadowspawn. Report, Yorl had said, and by the gods, he was anxious to have it done, if only they went to earth for the night…

  They turned, not the way he had anticipated, towards the lodgings he had been watching, but the other way, towards the Serpentine. Hanse swore and slipped out from his concealment, shadowed them most carefully in their course through the debris of the alley and out on to the street. The moon was not yet up; the only light came from the city itself, a vague glimmering on a bank of fog towards the harbour which diffused across the sky and promised one of those nights in which light spread through milky mist, from whatever sources—a thieves’ night, and a worse to come.

  The pair tended on up the Serpentine, bold as dockside whores
… but odd sights were common enough in the Maze by night, masks, cloaks, bright colours flaunted by night when the kindly dark masked the signs of wear and their threadbare condition. Man and woman, they were only conspicuous by their plainness, the woman shrouded by the robe and hood so that she might be instead some night prowling priest with an unlikely and rough guard.

  Hanse followed, in and out among the occasional walkers on the street, a kind of stalking at which he had some skill.

  ****

  … SO, WELL, It answered, at least, what Hanse had been up to, and upset all Cappen Varra’s calculations about Hanse as bluster and no threat. Cappen stopped at the corner with the trio in view, glanced over his own shoulder with a touch of mad humour and the desperate thought that the whole was getting to be a procession in the dark streets… the woman and Vis, and Hanse, and now himself but at least there was no fifth person that he could see, following him.

  Hanse moved off, slipping casually down the street amid the ordinary traffic with a skill Cappen found amazing … he had never seen Hanse work, not after this fashion; had never particularly wanted to think at depth on the essence of the smallish thief, that there was in fact something more than the temper and the knives and the vanity which made this man dangerous. Having seen it, he reckoned to himself that the only sensible course for him now was to go back into the Unicorn, work his way into whatever game might start—his current hope of prosperity—and forget Hanse entirely, never minding a moment when Hanse turned up as stiff and cold as Sjekso had, which was assuredly where he was headed at the moment. But perhaps it was the poetry of the matter, the suspicion that there might be something worth the witnessing … perhaps it was the assurance that Hanse was into far more than he knew, and that somewhere up there, without untidy recourse to the rapier that swung at his side … he might overtake the revenge-bound lunatic and talk him out of it. Hanse—was the only likely ally in a situation of his own; the woman had looked at him back there, and there was nagging at him an unwelcome vision, Hanse lying at the doorstep in the morning and himself there the day after—macabre fancy it might be, but the wind still blew up his back. There was only the matter of catching Hanse to stop him, and that was like putting one’s hands on a shadow. Cappen was not accustomed to feel awkward in his moves, looked down on the louts and ne’er-do wells who walked the Maze; possessed a grace surpassing most—in any situation.

  But not in walking the Maze by dark and unseen. Hanse was in his element, and Cappen followed him artlessly, down the length of the Serpentine, and into territory of the city at large—where the law came, and where a wanted thief was less than safe. The houses and shops here were more sturdy, and finally magnificent, and those latter existed behind walls, and most with bars on the windows. Walkers grew scarce for a time, and Cappen hung further back, afraid that he himself might attract the notice of the pair Hanse followed … which he earnestly did not want.

  One street and another, and sometimes a passage through narrower ways where Cappen found Hanse going more carefully, where they four were virtually alone and where a false move could alert the pair ahead. Cappen stayed far back then, and once he thought he had lost them all… but a quick move around a corner put them all in view again. Hanse looked back in that instant, while Cappen tried to stay inconspicuously part of a stack of barrels, recalling Hanse’s knives, and the murk of the night. The fog was coming on and the light played tricks; a light mist slicked the stones … and still the pair kept moving, out of the merchant quarter and into the quarter of the gods, past the square of the Promise of Heaven, where prostitutes, bedraggled in the mist, sat their accustomed benches like rain-soaked birds—They swung past this place and into the Avenue of Temples itself; and Cappen shrugged his cloak about him with a genuinely wretched chill and marvelled at the trio ahead, who moved, pursued and pursuer, with such a tireless purpose.

  And then another alley, a sudden move aside, which almost caught Hanse himself by surprise, near the magnificence of the dome of the temple of Ils and Shipri.

  There Hanse tucked himself away into shadow and Cappen quite lost sight of him, among the buttresses and the statuary of the out-thrust wing of the temple … vanished.

  Then the woman in black went out into the street, ascended the plain centre of the steps of Ils and Shipri, towards the temple guards who warded the constantly open doors in these uneasy times … four men and well armed, setting hands on hilts at once as they were approached. The woman cast back her hood: swords stayed undrawn, hands unmoving, numb as the patrons of the Unicorn.

  Then another shadow began to move, from the unwatched side of the steps, a man from out of the shadows, knife in hand, a swift stalking… which afforded Cappen even less of comfort and made him think that a wayward minstrel perhaps should have spent a safer, drier night in the Unicorn.

  ****

  FOLLOW, THE WIZARD had said, and Hanse pressed himself close against the wall, in the scant shadow afforded by a bit of brickwork, pressed himself there and watched in chill discomfort—blinked in horror while it happened, and four men died with swords still in sheath—only the last attempted a defence, and Mradhon Vis cut his throat in one quick and unmistakable move. Hanse blinked again and discovered to his consternation that the dark one, the woman, was gone, Mradhon Vis crouching now in sole possession of that bloody threshold. Hanse fingered his belt knife like a warding talisman; and wanted only to stay put, but all the while the icy cold at the pit of his neck, more biting than the cold of the mist, reminded him what he was there to do—what other power there was to offend. And he waited, reckoning every small move Mradhon Vis made, crouched over the bodies of the guards—every small shifting of a man busy at corpse-looting, every glance about as some hardy passerby noised along the main avenue—but none saw, none came near.

  The woman delayed about her business inside: it might have been a moment, or far longer—time did tricks in his mind. Hanse shifted uneasily, finally gathered his nerve, slipped out of that safe concealment and, in the turning of Vis’s head towards a distraction on the street… he eased past a gap in cover and into the alley Vis and the woman had left, along the temple itself.

  He reached the first of three barred windows, and with utmost silence took the chance and seized the bars, hoisted himself up to see. The breath passed silently over his teeth and his gut knotted up—a robber of wizards, Enas Yorl had said: and now a thief who preyed on gods.

  That struck hard … not that he darkened the doorway of his city gods with his presence or practised alms; but there were territories, there were limits to a thief’s audacity … or it went hard for all. It was his craft, by the gods, his art the woman involved; and they were old, those gods, and belonged in Sanctuary, as the Rankan emperor’s new lot never would. And the woman, the foreigner, the witch-thief, climbed up to the lap of bearded Ils himself and lifted the fabled necklace of Harmony from about the marble neck.

  “Shalpa,” Hanse swore silently, and with chilling appropriateness—let himself ever so carefully down from his vantage with one chill throbbing about his neck and another one travelling his backbone. So Enas Yorl wanted a report. And the gods of old Ilsig were plundered by a foreign witch while the Rankans moved in with their new lot of deities down the block, with scaffolds and plans and the evident intent of overshadowing the gods of Ilsig. Prince Kithakadis and the Rankan gods had “recommended”, Enas Yorl had said, sending a thief out to keep watch on this god-thievery.

  Hanse flattened himself back into his concealment with a sense of a world amiss, of matters under way no mere thief wanted part of. He had mixed in Kitty-Rat’s connivances once to his discomfort … but now, now it was possible Enas Yorl had a side of his own.

  And hired help.

  A footstep towards the temple front warned him: he crouched low and held his breath—Ischade, rejoining Mradhon Vis. “Done,” he heard her say; and “here’s an end. Let’s be gone, and quickly.”

  Of course an outsider like Mradhon Vis—of course a ma
n not Ilsig, who would have no scruples in killing Ilsig priests or robbing Ilsig gods.

  In the Emperor’s hire? Hanse wondered, which was far too much and too clear wondering for a thief; the sweat was coursing down his ribs despite the misty chill of the air. He was not sure at all now what side Yorl was … and it occurred to him to tear the amulet from his neck, drop it in the alley and run.

  But how far? And how long? He thought a second and chilling time of the wizard and his connections; recalled Sjekso; and Kithakadis himself … a prince of some small gratitude for services a thief had rendered; but more than dangerous if certain rumours started, that Yorl could spread … effortlessly.

  The pair headed back the way they had come, and he set out after them, seeing no other course.

  ****

  MORE AND MORE bizarre, this midnight wandering. Cappen went rigid in his hiding place first as the quarry passed, and then as he caught sight of Hanse again, padding after them as before.

  So there was no encounter. They went out and they did murder and came back, while Hanse followed after having seen what Hanse had seen … very unlike Hanse. Cappen suspected motives ill-defined, gave shape to nothing, only sure it was something more than Hanse’s private impulses that moved him now. He recalled the way in which the woman had passed a roomful of patrons at the Unicorn, in which she and her companion went where they liked on the street, in which guards died like slaughtered cattle…

  The relief Cappen felt at seeing Hanse mobile and not lying stiff in the alley further on, gave way to a horror at the silence of all that was done, the neatness of it; and a subtle dread of this pacing about the streets. The procession which had started to be humorous and might have become yet more so on the return … now assumed a thoroughly macabre character, such that he forbore to contact Hanse when he had, for one instant, the chance. Hanse’s face too, in the small glimpse he had had of it as he passed, had the wan, set look of terror.