Thieves World tw-1

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  Jamie held fast where he was. As fangs struck at him, he sidestepped, sprang back, and threw his shoulders against the shaft. Leverage swung jaws aside. He glided by the neck towards the forequarters. Both of his blades attacked the spine.

  Cappen and the women hastened on.

  They were almost at the pergola when footfalls drew his eyes rearwards. Jamie loped at an overtaking pace. Behind him, the sikkintair lay in a heap.

  The redhead pulled alongside. 'Hai, what a fight!' he panted. 'Thanks for this journey, friend! A drinking bout's worth of thanks!'

  They mounted the death-defiled stairs. Cappen peered across miles. Wings beat in heaven, from the direction of the mountains. Horror stabbed his guts. 'Look!' He could barely croak.

  Jamie squinted. 'More of them,' he said. 'A score, maybe. We can't cope with so many. An-army couldn't.'

  'That whistle was heard farther away than mortals would hear,' Danlis added starkly.

  'What do we linger for?' Rosanda wailed. 'Come, take us home!'

  'And the sikkintairs follow?' Jamie retorted. 'No. I've my lassies, and kinfolk, and -' He moved to stand before the parchment. Edged metal dripped in his hands; red lay splashed across helm, ringmail, clothing, face. His grin broke forth, wry. 'A spaewife once told me I'd die on the far side of strangeness. I'll wager she didn't know her own strength.'

  'You assume that the mission of the beasts is to destroy us, and when that is done they will return to their lairs.' The tone Danlis used might have served for a remark about the weather.

  'Aye, what else? The harm they'd wreak would be in a hunt for us. But put to such trouble, they could grow furious and harry our whole world. That's the more likely when Hazroah lies skewered. Who else can control them?'

  'None that I know of, and he talked quite frankly to us.' She nodded. 'Yes, it behoves us to die where we are.' Rosanda sank down and blubbered. Danlis showed irritation. 'Up!' she commanded her mistress. 'Up and meet your fate like a Rankan matron!'

  Cappen goggled hopelessly at her. She gave him a smile. 'Have no regrets, dear,' she said. 'You did well. The conspiracy against the state has been checked.'

  The far side of strangeness - check - chessboard - that version of chess where you pretend the right and left sides of the board are identical on a cylinder tumbled through Cappen. The Flying Knives drew closer fast. Curious aspects of geometry -

  Lightning-smitten, he knew ... or guessed he did ... 'No, Jamie, we go!' he yelled.

  'To no avail save reaping of innocents?' The big man hunched his shoulders. 'Never.'

  'Jamie, let us by! I can close the gate. I swear I can - I swear by - by Eshi -'

  The Northerner locked eyes with Cappen for a span that grew. At last: 'You are my brother in arms.' He stood aside. 'Go on.'

  The sikkintairs were so near that the noise of their speed reached Cappen. He urged Danlis towards the scroll. She lifted her skirt a trifle, revealing a dainty ankle, and stepped through. He hauled on Rosanda's wrist. The woman wavered to her feet but seemed unable to find her direction. Cappen took an arm and passed it into the next world for Danlis to pull. Himself, he gave a mighty shove on milady's buttocks. She crossed over.

  He did. And Jamie.

  Beneath the temple dome, Cappen's rapier reached high and slashed. Louder came the racket of cloven air. Cappen severed the upper cords. The parchment fell, wrinkling, crackling. He dropped his weapon, a-clang, squatted, and stretched his arms wide. The free corners he seized. He pulled them to the corners that were still secured, to make a closed band of the scroll.

  From it sounded monstrous thumps and scrapes. The sikkintairs were crawling into the pergola. For them the portal must hang unchanged, open for their hunting.

  Cappen gave that which he held a half-twist and brought the edges back together.

  Thus he created a surface which had but a single side and a single edge. Thus he obliterated the gate.

  He had not been sure what would follow. He had fleetingly supposed he would smuggle the scroll out, held in its paradoxical form, and eventually glue it unless he could burn it. But upon the instant that he completed the twist and juncture, the parchment was gone. Enas Yorl told him afterwards that he had made it impossible for the thing to exist.

  Air rushed in where the gate had been, crack and hiss. Cappen heard that sound as it were an alien word of incantation: 'Mobius-s-s.'

  Having stolen out of the temple and some distance thence, the party stopped for a few minutes of recovery before they proceeded to Molin's house.

  This was in a blind alley off the avenue, a brick-paved recess where flowers grew in planters, shared by the fanes of two small and gentle gods. Wind had died away, stars glimmered bright, a half moon stood above easterly roofs and cast wan argence. Afar, a tomcat serenaded his intended.

  Rosanda had gotten back a measure of equilibrium. She cast herself against Jamie's breast. 'Oh, hero, hero,' she crooned, 'you shall have reward, yes, treasure, ennoblement, everything!' She snuggled. 'But nothing greater than my unbounded thanks ...'

  The Northerner cocked an eyebrow at Cappen. The bard shook his head a little. Jamie nodded in understanding, and disengaged. 'Uh, have a care, milady,' he said. 'Pressing against ringmail, all bloody and sweaty too, can't be good for a complexion.'

  Even if one rescues them, it is not wise to trifle with the wives of magnates.

  Cappen had been busy himself. For the first time, he kissed Danlis on her lovely mouth; then for the second time; then for the third. She responded decorously.

  Thereafter she likewise withdrew. Moonlight made a mystery out of her classic beauty. 'Cappen,' she said, 'before we go on, we had better have a talk.'

  He gaped. 'What?'

  She bridged her fingers. 'Urgent matters first,' she continued crisply. 'Once we get to the mansion and wake the high priest, it will be chaos at first, conference later, and I - as a woman - excluded from serious discussion. Therefore best I give my counsel now, for you to relay. Not that Molin or the Prince are fools; the measures to take are for the most part obvious. However, swift action is desirable, and they will have been caught by surprise.'

  She ticked her points off. 'First, as you have indicated, the Hell Hounds' - her nostrils pinched in distaste at the nickname - 'the Imperial elite guard should mount an immediate raid on the temple of Ils and arrest all personnel for interrogation, except the Arch-priest. He's probably innocent, and in any event it would be inept politics. Hazroah's death may have removed the danger, but this should not be taken for granted. Even if it has, his co-conspirators ought to be identified and made examples of.

  'Yet, second, wisdom should temper justice. No lasting harm was done, unless we count those persons who are trapped in the parallel universe; and they doubtless deserve to be.'

  They seemed entirely males, Cappen recalled. He grimaced in compassion. Of course, the sikkintairs might eat them.

  Danlis was talking on: '- humane governance and the art of compromise. A grand temple dedicated to the Rankan gods is certainly required, but it need be no larger than that of Ils. Your counsel will have much weight, dear. Give it wisely. I will advise you.'

  'Uh?' Cappen said.

  Danlis smiled and laid her hands over his. 'Why, you can have unlimited preferment, after what you did,' she told him. 'I'll show you how to apply for it.'

  'But - but I'm no blooming statesman!' Cappen stuttered.

  She stepped back and considered him. 'True,' she agreed. 'You're valiant, yes, but you're also flighty and lazy and - Well, don't despair. I will mould you.'

  Cappen gulped and shuffled aside. 'Jamie,' he said, 'uh, Jamie, I feel wrung dry, dead on my feet. I'd be worse than no use - I'd be a drogue on things just when they have to move fast. Better I find me a doss, and you take the ladies home. Come over here and I'll tell you how to convey the story in fewest words. Excuse us, ladies. Some of those words you oughtn't to hear.'

  *

  A week thence, Cappen Varra sat drinking in the Vulgar Un
icorn. It was mid afternoon and none else were present but the associate tapster, his wound knitted.

  A man filled the doorway and came in, to Cappen's table. 'Been casting about everywhere for you,' the Northerner grumbled. 'Where've you been?'

  'Lying low,' Cappen replied. 'I've taken a place here in the Maze which'll do till I've dropped back into obscurity, or decide to drift elsewhere altogether.' He sipped his wine. Sunbeams slanted through windows; dust motes danced golden in their warmth; a cat lay on a sill and purred. 'Trouble is, my purse is flat.'

  'We're free of such woes for a goodly while.' Jamie flung his length into a chair and signalled the attendant. 'Beer!' he thundered.

  'You collected a reward, then?' the minstrel asked eagerly.

  Jamie nodded. 'Aye. In the way you whispered I should, before you left us. I'm baffled why and it went sore against the grain. But I did give Molin the notion that the rescue was my idea and you naught but a hanger-on whom I'd slip a few royals. He filled a box with gold and silver money, and said he wished he could afford ten times that. He offered to get me Rankan citizenship and a title as well, and make a bureaucrat of me, but I said no, thanks. We share, you and I, half and half. But right this now, drinks are on me.'

  'What about the plotters?' Cappen inquired.

  'Ah, those. The matter's been kept quiet, as you'd await. Still, while the temple of Ils can't be abolished, seemingly it's been tamed.' Jamie's regard sought across the table and sharpened. 'After you disappeared, Danlis agreed to let me claim the whole honour. She knew better - Rosanda never noticed - but Danlis wanted a man of the hour to carry her redes to the prince, and none remained save me. She supposed you were simply worn out. When last I saw her, though, she ... um-m ... she "expressed disappointment".' He cocked his ruddy head. 'Yon's quite a girl. I thought you loved her.'

  Cappen Varra took a fresh draught of wine. Old summers glowed along his tongue. 'I did,' he confessed. 'I do. My heart is broken, and in part I drink to numb the pain.'

  Jamie raised his brows. 'What? Makes no sense.'

  'Oh, it makes very basic sense,' Cappen answered. 'Broken hearts

  tend to heal rather soon. Meanwhile, if I may recite from a rondel

  I completed before you found me -

  'Each sword of sorrow that would maim or slay, My lady of the morning deftly parries. Yet gods forbid I be the one she marries! I rise from bed the latest hour I may. My lady comes to me like break of day; I dream in darkness if it chance she tarries.'

  A FEW REMARKS BY FURTWAN COINPINCH, MERCHANT

  The first thing I noticed about him, just that first impression you -understand, was that he couldn't be a poor man. Or boy, or youth, or whatever he was then. Not with all those weapons on him. From the shagreen belt he was wearing over a scarlet sash - a violently scarlet sash! - swung a curved dagger on his left hip and on the right one of those Ilbarsi 'knives' long as your arm. Not a proper sword, no. Not a military man, then. That isn't all, though. Some few of us know that his left buskin is equipped with a sheath; the slim thing and knife-hilt appear to be only a decoration. Gift from a woman, I heard him tell Old Thumpfoot one afternoon in the bazaar. I doubt it.

  (I've been told he has another sticker strapped less than comfortably to his inner thigh, probably the right. Maybe that's part of the reason he walks the way he does. Cat-supple and yet sort of stiff of leg all at ,once. A tumbler's gait - or a punk's swagger. Don't tell him I said!)

  Anyhow, about the weapons and my first impression that he couldn't be poor. There's a throwing knife in that leather and copper armlet, on his right upper arm, and another in the long bracer of black leather on that same arm. Both are short. The stickers I mean, not the bracers or the arms either.

  All that armament would be enough to scare anybody on a dark night, or even a moonbright one. Imagine being in the Maze or some place like that and out of the shadows comes this young bravo, swaggering, wearing all that sharp metal! Right at you out of the shadows that spawned him. Enough to chill even one of those Hell Hounds. Even one ofyou-know-who's boys in the blue hawk-masks might step aside.

  That was my impression. Shadowspawn. About as pleasant as gout or dropsy.

  SHADOWSPAWN by Andrew Offutt

  His mop of hair was blacker than black and his eyes nearly so, under brows that just missed meeting above a nose not quite falcate. His walk reminded some of one of those red-and-black gamecocks brought over from Mrsevada. They called him Shadow-spawn. No compliment was intended, and he objected until Cudget told him it was good to have a nickname - although he wished his own weren't Cudget Swearoath. Besides, Shadowspawn had a romantic and rather sinister sound, and that appealed to his ego, which was the largest thing about him. His height was almost average and he was rangy, wiry; swiftly wiry, with those bulgy rocks in his biceps and calves that other males wished they had.

  Shadowspawn. It was descriptive enough. No one knew where he'd been spawned, which was shadowy, and he worked among shadows. Perhaps it was down in the shadows of the 'streets' of Downwind and maybe it was over in Syr that he'd been birthed. It didn't matter. He belonged to Sanctuary and wished it belonged to him. He acted as if it did. If he knew or suspected that he'd come out of Downwind, he was sure he had risen above it. He just didn't have time for those street-gangs of which surely he'd have been chieftain.

  He was no more sure of his age than anyone else. He might have lived a score of years. It might have been fewer. Had a creditable moustache before he was fifteen.

  The raven-wing hair, tending to an indecisive curl, covered his ears without reaching his shoulders. He'd an earring under that hair, on the left. Few knew it. Had it done at fourteen, to impress her who took his virginity that year. (She was twoscore-and-two then, married to a man like a building stone with a belly. She's a hag with a belly out to here, now.)

  'The lashes under those thick glossy brows of his are so black and thick they look almost kohled, like a woman's or a priest over in Yenized,' a man called Weasel told Cusharlain, in the Vulgar Unicorn. 'Some fool made that remark once, in his presence. The fellow wears the scar still and knows he's lucky to be wearing tongue and life. Should have known that a bravo who wears two .throwing knives on his right arm is dangerous, and left-handed. And with a name like Shadowspawn ...!'

  His name was not Shadowspawn, of course. True, many did not know or no longer remembered his name. It was Hanse. Just Hanse. Not Hanse Shadowspawn; people called him the one or the other or nothing at all.

  He seemed to wear a cloak about him at all times, a thoughtful S'danzo told Cusharlain. Not a cloak of fabric; this one concealed his features, his mind. Eyes hooded like a cobra's, some said. They weren't, really. They just did not seem directed outward, those glittering black onyxes he had for eyes. Perhaps their gaze was fixed on the plank-sized chips on his shoulders. Mighty easily knocked off.

  By night he did not swagger, save when he entered a public place. Night of course was Hanse's time, as it had been Cudgel's. By night ... 'Hanse walks like a hungry cat,' some said, and they might shiver a bit. In truth he did not. He glided. His buskins' soft soles lifting only a finger's breadth with each step. They came down on the balls of the feet, not the heels. Some made fun of that not to Hanse - because it made for a sinuous glide strange in appearance. The better-born watched him with an aesthetic fascination. And some horripilation. Among females, highborn or otherwise, the fascination was often layered with interest, however unwilling. Most then said the predictable: a distasteful, rather sexy animal; that Hanse, that Shadowspawn.

  It had been suggested to him that a bit of committed practice could make him a real sword-slinger: he was a natural. Employment, a uniform ... Hanse was not interested. Indeed he sneered at soldiers, at uniforms. And now he hated them, with a sort of unreasoning reason.

  These things Cusharlain learned, and he began to know him called Shadowspawn. And to dislike him. Hanse sounded the sort of too-competent young snot you step aside for - and hate yourself for d
oing it.

  'Hanse is a bastard!' This from Shive the Changer, with a thump of his fist on the broad table on which he dealt with such as Hanse, changing loot into coin.

  'Ah.' Cusharlain looked innocently at him. 'You mean by nature.'

  'Probably by birth too. A bastard by birth and by nature! Better that all such cocky snotty stealthy arrogant bravos were stillborn!'

  'He's bitten you then, Shive?'

  'A bravo and a lowborn punk he is, and that's all.'

  'Punk?'

  'Well ... perhaps a cut above punk.' Shive touched his mous-tachioes, which he kept curled like the horns of a mountain goat. 'Cudget was a damned good thief. The sort of fellow who made the trade honourable. An art form. A pleasure doing business with. And Hanse was his apprentice, or nearly, sort of ... and he has the potential of being an even better thief. Not man - thief.' Shive wagged a finger made shiny by wax. 'The potential, mind you. He'll never realize it.' The finger paused on its way back to stroke one moustachio.

  'You think not,' Cusharlain said, drawing Shive out, pulling words from a man who knew how to keep his mouth shut and was alive and wealthy because he did.

  'I think not. He'll absorb a foot or so of sharp metal long before. Or dance on the air.'

  'As, I remind you, Cudget did,' Cusharlain said, noting that within the trade no one said 'hanged'.

  Shive took umbrage. 'After a long career! And Cudget was respected! He's respected still.'

  'Umm. Pity you admire the master but not the apprentice. He could use you, surely. And you him. If he's a successful thief, there'll be profit for the fence he chooses to -'

  'Fence? Fence?'

  'Sorry, Shive. The Changer he chooses to exchange his... goods with, for Rankan coin. There's always a profit to -'

  'He cheated me!'

  So. At last Shive admitted it. That's how he'd been bitten by this Hanse. Fat and fifty and the second most experienced Changer in Sanctuary, Shive had been cheated by a cocky youngster. 'Oh,' Cusharlain said. He rose, showing Shive a satirical little smile. 'You know, Shive ... you shouldn't admit that. You are after all a man with some twenty years' experience ... and he has only that many years of life, if not less.'