Shadows of Sanctuary

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  One-Thumb turned and wiped the dishrag along the shining bar and when the rag was gone, the small bundle was gone, also. “Now, what do you want to get involved in something like this for? You think you’re moving up? You’re not. Next time, when it’s this sort of thing, come round the back. Or, better, don’t come at all. I thought you had more sense.”

  Hanse’s hand smacked flat and loud upon the bar. “I have taken enough offal for one day, cup-bearer. Now I tell you what you do, Wide-Belly: You take what I brought you and your sage counsel, and you wrap it all together, and then you squat on it!” And stiff-kneed as a roused cat, Shadowspawn stalked away, towards the door, saying over his shoulder: “As for sense, I thought you had more.”

  “I have my business to think of,” called out One-Thumb, too boldly for a whine. “Ah, yes! So have I, so have I.”

  Chapter 11

  LAVENDER AND LEMON dawn light bedizened the white-washed barracks’ walls and coloured the palace parade grounds.

  Tempus had been working all night, out at Jubal’s estate where he was quartering his mercenaries away from town and Hell Hounds and Ilsig garrison personnel. He had fifty there, but twenty of them were paired members of three different Sacred Bands: Stepson’s legacy to him. The twenty had convinced the thirty nonallied operatives that “Stepsons” would be a good name for their squadron, and for the cohort it would eventually command should things go as everyone hoped.

  He would keep the Sacred Band teams and spread the rest throughout the regular army, and throughout the prince’s domain. They would find what clay they chose, and mould a division from it of which the spirit of Abarsis, if it were not too busy fighting theomachy’s battles in heaven, could look upon with pride. The men had done Tempus proud, already, that night at Jubal’s, and thereafter; and this evening when he had turned the corner round the slave barracks the men were refitting for livestock, there it had been, a love note written in lamb’s blood two cubits high on the encircling protective wall: “War is all and king of all, and all things come into being out of strife.”

  Albeit they had not got it exactly right, he had smiled, for though the world and the boyhood from out of which he had said such audacious things was gone to time. Stepson, called Abarsis, and his legacy of example and followers made Tempus think that perhaps (oh just perhaps) he, Tempus, had not been so young, or so foolish, as he had lately come to think that he had been. And, if thus the man, then his epoch, too, was freed of memory’s hindsightful taint.

  And the god and he were reconciled: This pushed away his curse and the shadow of distress it cast ever before him. His troubles with the prince had subsided. Zalbar had come through his test of fire and returned to stand his duty, thinking deeply, walking quietly. His courage would mend. Tempus knew his sort.

  Jubal’s disposition he had left to Kadakithis. He had wanted to take the famous ex-gladiator’s measure in single combat, but there was no fitness in it now, since the man would never be quick on his feet, should he live to regain the use of them.

  Not that the world was as ridiculously beautiful as was the arrogant summer morning which did not understand that it was a Sanctuary morning and therefore should at least be gory, garish or full of flies buzzing about his head. No, one could find a few thorns in one’s path, still. There was Shadowspawn, called Hanse, exhibiting unseemly and proprietary grief over Abarsis whenever it served him, yet not taking a billet among the Stepsons that Tempus had offered. Privately, Tempus thought he might yet come to it, that he was trying to step twice into the same river. When his feet chilled enough, he would step out on to the banks of manhood. If he could sit a horse better, perhaps his pride would let him join in where now, because of that, he could only sneer.

  Hanse, too, must find his own path. He was not Tempus’s problem, though Tempus would gladly take on that burden should Shadowspawn ever indicate a desire to have help toting it.

  His sister, Cime, however, was his problem, his alone, and the enormity of that conundrum had him casting about for any possible solution, taking pat answers up and putting them down like gods move seeds from field to field. He could kill her, rape her, deport her; he could not ignore her, forget her, or suffer along without confronting her.

  That she and One-Thumb had become enamoured of one another was something he had not counted on. Such a thing had never occurred to him.

  Tempus felt the god rustling around in him, the deep cavernous sensing in his most private skull that told him the deity was going to speak. Silently! he warned the god. They were uneasy with each other, yet, like two lovers after a trial separation.

  We can take her, mildly, and then she will leave. You cannot tolerate her presence. Drive her off. I will help thee, spake Vashanka.

  “Must you be so predictable, Pillager?” Tempus mumbled under his breath, so that Abarsis’s Trôs horse swivelled its ears back to eavesdrop. He slapped its neck, and told it to continue on straight and smartly. They were headed towards Lastel’s modest eastside estate.

  Constancy is one of My attributes, jibed the god in Tempus’s head meaningfully.

  “You are not getting her, O Ravening One. You who are never satisfied, in this one thing, will not triumph. What would we have between us to keep it clear who is whom? I cannot allow it.”

  You will, said Vashanka so loud in his head that he winced in his saddle and the Trôs horse broke stride, looking reproachfully about at him to see what that shift of weight could possibly be construed to mean.

  Tempus stopped the horse in the middle of the cool shadowed way on that beautiful morning and sat stiffly a long while, conducting an internal battle which had no resolution.

  After a time, he swung the horse back in its tracks, kicked it into a lope towards the barracks from which he had just come. Let her stay with One-Thumb, if she would. She had come between him and his god before. He was not ready to give her to the god, and he was not ready to give himself back into the hands of his curse, rip asunder what had been so laboriously patched together and at such great cost. He thought of Abarsis, and Kadakithis, and the refractory upcountry peoples, and he promised Vashanka any other woman the god should care to choose before sundown. Cime would keep, no doubt, right where she was. He would see to it that Lastel saw to her.

  Abarsis’s Trôs horse snorted softly, as if in agreement, single-footing through Sanctuary’s better streets towards the barracks. But the Trôs horse could not have known that by this simple decision its rider had attained to a greater victory than in all the wars of all the empires he had ever laboured to increase. Now the Trôs horse whose belly quivered between Tempus’s knees as it issued a blaring trumpet to the dusty air did so not because of its rider’s triumph over self and god, but out of pure high spirits, as horses always will praise a fine day dawned.

  Things The Editor Never Told Me

  By Lynn Abbey

  I HAD JUST administered the coup de grace to my latest THIEVES’ WORLD offering—my third—when Bob asked if I’d like to have the last word in SHADOWS OF SANCTUARY, It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, though I’d no idea how I would put into words the experiences of working on all three THIEVES’ WORLD volumes. After many unsuccessful attempts at getting this essay down on paper, I began to suspect that maybe Bob hadn’t known the right words either. He was smiling when he made the offer, and he doesn’t usually give up a by-line that easily. Sigh. Another example of Things the Editor Never Told Me.

  Actually, a lot of things the editor didn’t tell us were things he didn’t know himself. We were all naive about the mechanics of a franchised universe back at Boskone of 1978 when the THIEVES’ WORLD project was created. It sounded wondrously uncomplicated: we would exchange character sketches and refer to a common street map; Bob would write us a history; Andy Offutt would create our gods. We only had to go to ground and write our 5,000-10,000 words. Fat chance. Unexpected discovery number one: Sanctuary isn’t an imaginary anything; it’s a state of mind recognized by the American Psychiatric Associati
on.

  We thought we’d gone to ground—it turned out that we’d gone overboard. Bob hadn’t told us the things we’d really need to know, and none of us wanted to dictate to the guy who’d created this funhouse, so each of us made great use of the little vicissitudes of life that would add “grit” and “realism” to our stories. My not-gypsy read not-Tarot cards, dealt with necromancers, stole a corpse and witnessed the usual street violence.

  It didn’t seem too bad until I found the entire book oozing out of my mailbox and read the volume in its entirety. We had created many drugs, magicians, vices, brothels, dives, haunts, curses and feuds. Sanctuary wasn’t a provincial backwater; it wasn’t even the Imperial armpit; it was the Black Hole of not Calcutta. Things could only get worse …

  And they did. Bob told us the second volume would be called TALES FROM THE VULGAR UNICORN—the very name incited depravity. And we rose to the occasion or perhaps we fell. I explored the unpleasant pieces of my S’danzo’s past, gave her a berserker for a half-brother and created Buboe, the night bartender down at the Vulgar Unicorn. Well, Bob said we were supposed to have a scene down at the ol’ V.U.—but One-Thumb was hors de combat in the bowels of Sanctuary and no one knew who was running the joint. (I recall one of my confreres created someone called Two-Thumbs—I think that was from spite.) Buboe—a buboe isn’t a person, a buboe is the rather large glandular eruption that accompanies the terminal stages of the Black Plague; opening it ensures death for the opener and the openee.

  TALES didn’t ooze out of the mailbox; it ate right through the metal. I haven’t seen all the stories for volume three yet, but I’m confident the downward spiral has continued. Each set of stories brings new oddments of human behaviour, new quirks of character that the authors wouldn’t dare put in a universe for which he or she was solely responsible. In Sanctuary, though, where guilt is shared along with the glory, one volume’s innuendo becomes the next volume’s complete story.

  And frankly, nastiness is interesting. If I tell you that the smell of rotting blood can linger for years you might not notice what I don’t tell you. Consider for a moment some of the things none of the authors know for sure: the weather in Sanctuary—daily and seasonal. It must be strange. If the Downwinders are downwind of the town then the prevailing wind is off the land—try convincing any coast-dweller of that.

  As far as the city itself is concerned, I’ve always imagined it as a sort of late medieval town, out-growing its walls. The Maze is built like the Shambles in York, England, where each storey gets built out over the lower one so everybody can drop their slops directly into the street instead of on their neighbour. There are those who seem to think Sanctuary’s like Rome. (Nonsense, Ranke is Rome—or is it that Rome is rank?) They imagine that the town has the rudiments of sewer systems, that the villas are attractive, open buildings and that at least some of the streets are paved. There also seems to be a Baghdad by-the-Sea approach, with turban’d tribesmen and silk-clad ladies, as well as a few indications that we might be dealing with a Babylonian building style. Since so many of our stories are set in the dark, I suppose it doesn’t matter that we don’t really agree on what the city looks like.

  Of course, nobody, including the Empire, knows how big Sanctuary really is. Anytime one of us needs a secret meeting place we just create one—Sanctuary is either very large or very cramped. You can live your whole life in the Maze or the Bazaar, and yet it only takes fifteen minutes to walk from one end of town to the other—or does it? I’m not sure.

  Take the Bazaar, for example. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in that bazaar and I don’t know exactly how it’s put together. Part of it is a farmers’ market (though I haven’t the faintest idea where the farmers are when they aren’t at the Bazaar). Other parts are like the cloth-fairs of medieval France, where merchants sell their wares wholesale. Still other parts resemble the permanent bazaars of the Middle East. Rather than trouble myself with philosophical questions, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, someday I’ve got to figure out how many S’danzo can live full-time in the Bazaar.

  Moving from angels to gods for a moment—it seems probable that anyone living in Sanctuary would have a personal relationship to the gods—nothing like worship or faith, mind you. The people seem homeric in their religion: the last thing an ordinary citizen wants is dealing with the gods; worship is designed to keep the deities at bay. We have at least two major pantheons represented in the temples and the gods know how many priesthoods trying to control them. They tell me there’s a fellow out in California who has made a coherent mythology for the religions of Sanctuary. He’s putting his theology into Chaosium’s THIEVES’ WORLD game, but nobody’s saying where they’re putting the intrepid mythmaster.

  Then there’s currency—or why we call it THIEVES’ WORLD. Since no one knows how the currency works, the townsfolk have no choice but to steal from each other. We sort of agree that there are copper coins, silver coins and gold coins—but we don’t know their names or their conversion rates. We say: a few copper coins; or we get very specific and say: nine Rankan soldats—just in case someone else is writing about soldats that weren’t minted in Ranke. But how many soldats make a shaboozh—or does it work the other way around? It probably does.

  Someday I’ll create a money-lender for the town; making change in Sanctuary has got to be an art form. It won’t do any good, though. Citizens and authors alike will find reasons not to visit my money-lender. They’ll set up their own rates of exchange. The Prince will debase the currency. Vashanka will start spitting Indianhead nickels in his temple. I won’t let that stop me. If the editor won’t tell me how these things are to be done, I’ll just have to start telling him.