Thieves World Part 4

Nonetheless you're acting as though you have forgotten something.'

For a brief moment she failed to take his point. Then her hand flew to her open mouth.

'Two deaths,' she whispered.

'Yes, indeed. And I scarcely need to tell you to whom a traitor in the imperial court would apply for a spell powerful enough to drag me into the matter w.i.l.l.y nilly. I could make the paper legible. I could not evade the consequences of undoing a colleague's work.'

'Whose death? Mine?

'It would be politic to minimize the danger, as for instance by taking employment with a seafarer. Many merchant-captains would be glad of a skilful clerk, and after your apprenticeship with Melilot you're well equipped for such a post. Moreover, your present master is inclined to jealousy. You are half his age, yet already he regards you as a rival.'

'He dissembles well,' muttered Jarveena, 'but now and then he's acted in a fashion that makes me believe you.'

'He might regard you more kindly were you to become a sort of foreign agent for him. I'm sure you could contrive - for a reasonable .fee - to supply him with commercially valuable information. He would scarcely object to adding other strings to his bow: trading in spices, for instance.'

For a while Jarveena had seemed enlivened by his discourse. Now she fell back into gloom.

'Why should I want to make myself rich, let alone him? Ever since I can remember I've had a purpose in life. Ifs gone - carried to the sky with the stench of Nizharu!'

'It takes a very rich person to commission a spell.'

'What would I want with magic?' she said contemptuously.

A second later, and it was as though fire coursed all over her body, outlining every mark that defaced her, every whiplash, every burn, every cut and scratch.

She had forgotten until now, but sometime during that extraordinary night when she had lain with him, he had taken the trouble to trace her whole violent life story from the map of her skin.

Now she also remembered thinking that it must be for some private magical reason. Could she have been wrong? Could it have been simpler than that - could it just have been that he sympathized with one whom life had scarred in another way?

'You might wish,' he was saying calmly, 'to cleanse your body of the past as I think you have now begun to cleanse your mind.'

'Even ...?' She could not complete the question save by raising her hand to the right side of her chest.

'In time. You are young. Nothing is impossible. But one thing is much too possible. We've spoken of it. Now, act!'

They were almost at the gate, and the crowd was pressing and' jostling; people were setting their hands to their money-belts and pouches, for these were prime conditions for theft.

'I take it you'd not have spoken up unless you had a new employer in mind for me?' Jarveena said at length.

'You're most perceptive.'

'And if there were not some long-term advantage in it for yourself?'

Enas Yorl sighed. 'There is a long-term purpose to everything. If there were not, spells would be impossible.'

'So there was a purpose behind Nizharu's dropping of the scroll?'

'Dropping ... ?'

'Oh! Why didn't I think of that?'

'In time, I'm sure you would have done. But you came to Sanctuary so recently, you could scarcely be expected to know that in his boyhood Aye-Gophlan was counted among the smartest dips and cutpurses in the city. How else do you think he managed to buy himself a commission in the guards? Does he talk as though he came from a wealthy background?'

They were at the gate, and being squeezed through. Clutching her writing-case tightly with one hand, keeping the other folded over the silver pin which fastened her cloak in a roll around her waist, Jarveena thought long and long.

And came to a decision.

Even though her main purpose in life up to now had vanished, there was no reason why she should not find another and maybe better ambition. If that were so, there were good reasons to try and prolong her life by quitting Sanctuary.

Although ...

She glanced around in alarm for the magician, thinking them separated in the throng, and with relief was able to catch him by the arm.

'Will distance make any difference? I mean, if the doom is on me, can I flee from it?'

'Oh, it's not on you. It's merely that there were two deaths in the charm, and only one has happened. Any day of any year, scores of hundreds die in any city of this size. It's probable that the spell will work itself out locally; when there's a thunderstorm, the lightning strikes beneath it, not a hundred leagues away. Not inconceivably the other death may be that of someone who was as guilty as Nizharu in the sack of Forgotten Holt. He had soldiers with him, did he not?'

'Yes, they were all soldiers, whom I long mistook for bandits ...! Oh, what a pa.s.s this land has come to! You're quite right! I'm going away, as far as I can, whether or not it means I can outrun my death!'

She caught his hand, gave it a squeeze, and leaned close. 'Name the ship that I must look for!'

The day the ship sailed it was unsafe for Enas Yorl to venture on the street; occasionally the changes working in him cycled into forms that n.o.body, not with the kindest will in the world, could mistake for human. He was therefore obliged to watch the tiring way, making use of a scrying-gla.s.s, but he was determined to make certain that nothing had gone wrong with his scheme.

All turned out well. He tracked the ship, with Jarveena at her stern, until sea mists obscured her, and then leaned back in what, for the time being, could not exactly be a chair as most people thought of chairs.

'And with you no longer around to attract it,' he murmured to the air, 'perhaps luck may lead that second death-sentence to be pa.s.sed on one who wearies beyond measure of mad existence, sport of a hundred mindless spells, this miserable, this pitiable Enas Yorl.'

Yet some hope glimmered, like the red pits he had to wear for eyes, in the knowledge that at least one person in the world thought more kindly of him than he did himself. At length, with a snorting laugh, he covered the scrying-gla.s.s and settled down resignedly to wait out the implacable transformation, a little comforted by knowing that so far he had never been the same shape twice.

THE FACE OF CHAOS.

by Lynn Abbey

The cards lay face down in a wide crescent on the black-velvet-covered table Illyra used for her fortune-telling. Closing her eyes, she touched one at random with her index finger, then overturned it. The face of Chaos, portrait of man and woman seen in a broken mirror. She had done a card-reading for herself; an attempt to penetrate the atmosphere of foreboding that had hung over the ramshackle cloth-and-wood structure she and Dubro, the bazaar smith, called home. Instead it had only brought more anxiety.

She went to another small table to apply a thick coating of kohl to her eyelids.

No one would visit a young, pretty S'danzo to have their fortune told, and no stranger could enter her home for any other reason. The kohl and the formless S'danzo costume concealed her age in the dimly lit room, but if some love deluded soldier or merchant moved too close, there was always Dubro under the canopy a few steps away. One sight of the brawny, sweating giant with his heavy mallet ended any crisis.

'Sweetmeats! Sweetmeats! Always the best in the bazaar. Always the best in Sanctuary!'

The voice of Haakon, the vendor, reached through the cloth-hung doorway. Illyra finished her toilette quickly. Dark ma.s.ses of curly hair were secured with one pin under a purple silk scarf which contrasted garishly with each of the skirts, the shawl, and the blouse she wore. She reached deep within those skirts for her purse and removed a copper coin.

It was still early enough in the day that she might venture outside their home.

Everyone in the bazaar knew she was scarce more than a girl, and there would be no city-folk wandering about for another hour, at least.

'Haakon! Over here!' She called from under theCanopy where Dubro kept his tools.

'Two ... no, three, please.'

He lifted three of the sticky treats on to a sh.e.l.l that she held out for them, accepting her copper coin with a smile. In an hour's time, Haakon would want five of the same coin for such a purchase, but the bazaar-folk sold the best to each other for less.

She ate one, but offered the other two to Dubro. She would have kissed him, but the smith shrank back from public affection, preferring privacy for all things which pa.s.s between a man and woman. He smiled and accepted them wordlessly. The big man seldom spoke; words came slowly to him. He mended the metal wares of the bazaar-folk, improving many as he did so. He had protected Illyra since she'd been an orphaned child wandering the stalls, turned out by her own people for the irredeemable crime of being a half-caste. Bright-eyed, quick-tongued Illyra spoke for him now whenever anything needed to be said, and in turn, he still took care of her.

The sweetmeats gone, Dubro returned to the fire, lifting up a barrel hoop he had left there to heat. Illyra watched with never-sated interest as he laid it on the anvil to pound it back into a true circle for Jofan, the wine-seller. The mallet fell, but instead of the clear, ringing sound of metal on metal, there was a hollow clang. The horn of the anvil fell into the dirt.

Even Haakon was wide-eyed with silent surprise. Dubro's anvil had been in the bazaar since ... since Dubro's grandfather for certain, and perhaps longer - no one could remember before that. The smith's face darkened to the colour of the cooling iron. Illyra placed her hands over his.

'We'll get it fixed. We'll take it up to the Court of Anns this afternoon. I'll borrow Moonflower's a.s.s-and-cart ...'

'No!' Dubro exploded with one tortured word, shook loose her hands, and stared at the broken piece of his livelihood.

'Can't fix an anvil that's broken like that one,' Haakon explained softly to her. 'It'll only be as strong as the seam.'

'Then we'll get a new one,' she responded, mindful of Dubro's bleak face and her own certain knowledge that no one else in the bazaar possessed an anvil to sell.

'There hasn't been a new anvil in Sanctuary since before Ranke closed down the sea-trade with Ilsig. You'd need four camels and a year to get a mountain-cast anvil like that one into the bazaar - if you had the gold.'

A single tear smeared through the kohl. She and Dubro were well off by the standards of the bazaar. They had ample copper coins for Haakon's sweetmeats and fresh fish three times a week, but a pitifully small h.o.a.rd of gold with which to convince the caravan merchants to bring an anvil from distant Ranke.

'We've got to have an anvil!' She exclaimed to the unlistening G.o.ds, since Dubro and Haakon were already aware of the problem.

Dubro kicked dirt over his fire and strode away from the small forge.

'Watch him for me, Haakon. He's never been like this.'

'I'll watch him - but it will be your problem tonight when he comes home.'

A few of the city-folk were already milling in the aisles of the bazaar; it was high time to hide in her room. Never before in her five years of working the S'danzo trade within the bazaar had she faced a day when Dubro did not lend his calm presence to the stream of patrons. He controlled their coming and going.

Without him, she did not know who was waiting, or how to discourage a patron who had questions - but no money. She sat in the incense-heavy darkness waiting and brooding.

Moonflower. She would go to Moonflower, not for the old woman's broken-down cart, but for advice. The old woman had never shunned her the way the other S'danzo had. But Moonflower wouldn't know about fixing anvils, and what could she add to the message so clearly conveyed by the Face of Chaos? Besides, Moonflower's richest patrons arrived early in the day to catch her best 'vibrations'. The old woman would not appreciate a poor relation taking up her patrons' valuable time.

No patrons of her own yet, either. Perhaps the weather had turned bad. Perhaps, seeing the forge empty, they a.s.sumed that the inner chamber was empty also.

Illyra dared not step outside to find out.

She shuffled and handled the deck of fortune-telling cards, acquiring a measure of self-control from their worn surfaces. Palming the bottom card, Illyra laid it face-up on the black velvet.

'Five of Ships,' she whispered.

The card was a stylized scene of five small fishing boats, each with its net cast into the water. Tradition said that the answer to her question was in the card. Her gift would let her find it -if she could sort out the many questions floating in her thoughts.

'Illyra, the fortune-teller?'

Illyra's reverie was interrupted by her first patron before she had gained a satisfactory focus in the card. This first woman had problems with her many lovers, but her reading was spoiled by another patron stepping through the door at the wrong time. This second patron's reading was disrupted by the fish-smoker looking for Dubro. The day was everything the Face of Chaos had promised.

The few readings which were not disrupted reflected her own despair more than the patron's. Dubro had not returned, and she was startled by any sound from the outside canopy. Her patrons sensed the confusion and were unsatisfied with her performance, Some refused to pay. An older, more experienced S'danzo would know how to handle these things, but Illyra only shrank back in frustration. She tied a frayed rope across the entrance to her fortune-telling room to discourage anyone from seeking her advice.

'Madame Illyra?'

An unfamiliar woman's voice called from outside, undaunted by the rope.

'I'm not seeing anyone this afternoon. Come back tomorrow.'

'I can't wait until tomorrow.'

They all say that, Illyra thought. Everyone else always knows that they are the most important person I see and that their questions are the most complex. But they are all very much the same. Let the woman come back.

The stranger could be heard hesitating beyond the rope. Illyra heard the sound of rustling cloth - possibly silk - as the woman finally turned away. The sound jarred the S'danzo to alertness. Silken skirts meant wealth. A flash of vision illuminated Illyra's mind - this was a patron she could not let go elsewhere.

'If you can't wait, I'll see you now,' she yelled.

'You will?'

Illyra untied the rope and lifted the hanging cloth to let the woman enter. She had surrounded herself with a shapeless, plain shawl; her face was veiled and shadowed by a corner of the shawl wound around her head. The stranger was certainly not someone who came to the S'danzo of the bazaar often. Illyra retied the rope after seating her patron on one side of the velvet-covered table.

A woman of means who wishes to be mysterious. That shawl might be plain, but it is too good for someone as poor as she pretends to be. She wears silk beneath it, and smells of roses, though she has tried to remove perfumes. No doubt she has gold, not silver or copper.

'Would you not be more comfortable removing your shawl? It is quite warm in here,' Illyra said, after studying the woman.

'I'd prefer not to.'

A difficult one, Illyra thought.

The woman's hand emerged from the shawl to drop three old Ilsig gold coins on to the velvet. The hand was white, smooth, and youthful. The Ilsig coins were rare now that the Rankan empire controlled Sanctuary. The woman and her questions were a welcome relief from Illyra's own thoughts.

'Well, then, what is your name?'

'I'd prefer not to say.'

'I must have some information if I'm to help you,' Illyra said as she scooped the coins into a worn piece of silk, taking care not to let her fingers touch the gold.

'My ser ... There are those who tell me that you alone of the S'danzo can see the near future. I must know what will happen to me tomorrow night.'

The question did not fulfil Illyra's curiosity or the promise of mystery, but she reached for her deck of cards.

'You are familiar with these?' she asked the woman.

'Somewhat.'