Shadows of Sanctuary978-0441806010 (21 page)

Hanse said, watching hot oil slosh on to the man's tunic and bare legs and feet. It also splashed wall and door and ran along the floor, burning. At the same time, a third groan of unendurable agony rose behind the other door, the big one still closed.

'Master!' Hanse screeched, high-voiced. 'FIRE!' And he shoved the squatty fellow backwards, kicked the burning lamp in after him, and yanked the door shut. Instantly he attacked the other one, and soon entered Hell. Part of a man lay on a table, a short skinny fellow. He was even shorter and skinnier now, bereft of both legs and both arms, all his hair, and his left nipple with part of the pectoral. Even as Hanse shuddered, he knew there was only one form of rescue for this wretch. Ignoring the shining sharp instruments Kurd used, Hanse drew the arm-long blade those crazies up in the Ilbars Hills called a knife, got his best two-handed grip, and struck with all his might. Blood gushed and Hanse clamped his teeth against vomit. He had to strike again to complete the job. Now only a torso lay on the table, and a shuddering Shadowspawn clung to the weapon as he squinted around a chamber full of tables and thoughtfully provided with graded runnels in the floor, for the carrying off of blood.

'Thales?'

Two groans replied. One of them ended with 'help', weak as a kitten. It was not Tempus's voice, but Hanse went to that table.

'He - he - he's cut off my right arm and... and three fingers of my-my 1-1-le eft hannnd ... just 10 ... just to...' An enormous bodyshaking shudder refused to let the man finish.

'You do not bleed. Your legs? Feet?' Hanse was squinting without really wanting to see.

'I -I - they ... there...'

'Think,' Shadowspawn said, swallowing hard. 'I can cut these straps or your throat. Think, and choose.' He started to turn away.

'I am ... ali-i-ive ... I can wa-a-alk...'

Hanse sliced off the man's restraining straps. 'I seek Tempus.'

'You seek death here, thief!' a voice said, and light flooded the chamber. Hanse didn't pause to reply or look to see who bore the light. He turned, plucking forth a guardless knife like a leaf of steel, and threw. Only then did he really look at the man in the doorway; throw once to disconcert, the second time with aim. Lean and more than lean the man was, pallid skin taut. A man in a voluminous nightshirt, a man to get a chill from a south wind in June. A man who held a cocked crossbow in one hand, awkwardly, and a closed lamp or lanthorn in the other, sleeve sliding back to show an arm of bone plated with parchment. Kurd.

He was ducking the whizzing knife that missed by several inches. The lanthorn Swung wildly, splashing lunatic flashes of yellow light off walls and floor and tables with ghastly stains. The doke should have put the light down first, Hanse thought, plucking out another sliver of sharp steel. With both hands on that little crossbow Kurd might be dangerous. Instead his arm was nailed to the door by a knife that caught cloth but only raked skin - there was no flesh - so that the monster cried out more in fear than in pain. The crossbow hit the floor, thunked, and sent its bolt thunk-twanging into a wall or a table leg or - Hanse didn't care.

'I'm here for Tempus, butcher. Just stand there and provide light. Move and I'll throw again.' He showed Kurd a third bright blade, sheathed it. 'You'd look good with another navel, anyhow.' Then he went to the source of the third groan. 'Oh, oh gods, oh, oh gods, why is this allowedT

No god answered the anguished query torn from Shadowspawn by the sight of Tempus.

Big blond Tempus answered, scarless and armless, and the answer came from a mouth without a tongue. He managed to make Hanse understand that three pins were stuck into each stump. Hanse steeled himself to pull them out before turning to gush vomit on to the grooved floor of Kurd's laboratory of torment, and whirled back to send such a glare at the vivisectionist that Kurd shivered and stood still as a statue, lanthorn held high.

Hanse cut Tempus loose and helped him sit up. The big man did not bleed. He bore various cuts, all of which looked old. They were not. He made stomach and heart wrenching sounds, ghastly noises that Hanse interpreted as 'I'll heal', which was just as ghastly. What was this man?

'Can you walk?'

More noises. Repeated. Again. Hanse thought he understood, and bent to look. Yes. Minus some toes, Tempus had said. He was. Three. No, four. The middle one was gone from the left foot

'Thales, there's only me and I can't carry you. I freed another and he can't help. What shall I do?'

It took Tempus a long while to make him understand, trying to form words without a tongue, and once Kurd moved. Hanse turned to see the other freed wretch fleeing past the vivisectionist. Hanse threatened and Kurd froze. He held the lantern in a quivering hand at the end of a wavering arm. Strap Kurd to a table, Tempus had said. Where's servant?

Kurd answered that one, once he had a knife at his flat gut. His gardener and sole retainer was unconscious.

'Oh,' Hanse said, 'he'll want to be bound, then,' and worked the blade out of sleeve and door. With a knife in either hand, he gestured. 'Hang the lanthorn.'

'You can't -'

Hanse poked him with sharp steel. 'I can. Run complain to the Prince-Governor as soon as you can. You can also die now, which would be a shame. But I'll try to stick you in the belly, low, just deep enough so you'll be a day or three about dying. Of gangrene, maybe. Hang that lanthorn, monster!'

Kurd did, on the hook that was, naturally enough, beside the door. He turned to meet Hanse's foot driving straight up between his skinny shanks. It impacted with a jar.

'Something for your balls, if you have one,' Hanse said, and didn't even glance at the man who sank all bulge-eyed and gasping to his knees, with both hands in the predictable position. Hanse hurried to where the gardener lay, not even covered by the blanket his master had used to smother the fire. By the time Hanse finished trussing him with strips of his nightshirt, the gnomish fellow would starve before he freed himself.

Minutes later his master was strapped to one of his own tables. Hanse gagged him, because Kurd had left off threatening to plead and make the most ridiculous promises. Hanse returned to Tempus.

'They couldn't get loose for a roomful of gold, Thales. Now how in the name of every god am I to get you out of here and back to town, friend?'

Tempus required five minutes and more to make himself understood. Don't. Lay me back. I'll heal. The toes first. Tomorrow I'll be able to walk. Wine?

Hanse laid him back. Hanse fetched wine and blankets and some sort of gruelly pudding. Knowing that Tempus hated his helplessness, Hanse fed him, helped him guzzle about a gallon of wine, arranged him, covered him, checked Kurd and his servant, made sure the house was locked, and roamed it. Surgeon's tools, a bag of coins, and a pile of bedding he piled outside the door to the chamber of scientific experimentation. He would not lie in a monster's bed, or on one of those tables! He slept, at last, on the floor. On bedding from the gardener's chamber, not Kurd's. He wanted nothing of Kurd's. Valuable knives and the bag of money were different. He awoke at dawn, looked in on three sleeping men, marvelled, and left that place that was nine times more horrible by day. He found a sausage, considered, and chose flatbread instead. Only the gods and Kurd knew what sort of meat comprised that sausage. In a shed Hanse found a cart and a mule. He had to do some chopping and some seating. At last he got Tempus out of the ruined house and into the cart padded with hay. Hanse covered him amid shudders. Tempus's cuts looked days older, nearly healed.

'Would you like a few fingers or nose or something of Kurd to accompany you out of here, Thales?'

Almost, Tempus frowned. '

'0,' he said, and Hanse knew it was a, no. 'You want to, uh, leave them for

... later?' Tempus's reply was almost a yes, for me. Hanse got him out of there. He used much of Kurd's money to buy the place and services of a tongueless, nearly blind old woman, along with some soft food, wine, blankets and cloak, and he went away from them with a few coins and hideous memories.

The coins bought him expensive treatment from a leech who dared not chuckle or comment as he cleaned and bandaged a buttock with multiple lacerations, which he said would heal beautifully.

After that Hanse was sick in his room for the better part of a week. The remaining three coins bought him anaesthetic in the form of strong drink. For another week he feared that he would encounter Tempus on the street or someplace, but he did not. After that, amid rumours of some sort of insurrection somewhere near, he began to fear that he would never see Tempus, and then of course he did see him. Healed and scarless. Hanse went home and threw up. He traded a few things for more strong drink, and he got drunk and stayed that way for a while. He just didn't feel like stealing, or facing Tempus, or Kadakithis either. He did dream, of two gods and a girl of sixteen or so. Ils and Shalpa and Mignureal. And quicklime.

by Diana L. Paxson

'So why did you come back?' Gilla's shrill retort interrupted Lalo's 'attempts to explain why he had not been home the night before. 'Has every tavern in Sanctuary shown you the door?' She planted her fists on her spreading hips, the meaty flesh on her upper arms quivering below the short sleeves of her shift, and glared at him.

Lalo stepped backwards, caught his heel on the leg of his easel, and clattered to the floor in a tangle of splintering wood and skinny limbs. The baby began to cry. While Lalo gasped for breath, Gilla took a long stride to the cradle and clutched the child to her breasts, patting him soothingly. Echoes of their older children's quarrels with their playmates drifted from the street below, mingling with the clatter of a cart and the calls of vendors hawking their wares in the Bazaar.

'Now see what you've done!' said Gilla when the baby had quieted. 'Isn't it enough that you bring home no bread? If you can't earn an honest living painting, why don't you turn to thievery like everyone else in this dungheap of a town?' Her face, reddened by anger and the heat of the day, swam above him like a mask of the demon-goddess Dyareela at Festival time. At least I have that much honour left! Lalo bit back the words, remembering times, when one of his merchant patrons had refused to pay, that the limner had let fall the location of rich pickings while drinking in the Vulgar Unicorn. And if, thereafter, one of his less reputable acquaintances chose to share with him a few anonymous coins, surely honour did not require him to ask whence they came. No, it had not been honour that kept him honest, thought Lalo bitterly, but fear of bringing shame to Gilla and the children, and a rapidly deteriorating belief in his own artistic destiny.

He struggled up on one elbow, for the moment too dispirited to stand. Gilla sniffed in exasperation, laid down the child and stalked to the other end of the single room in the tenement which served as kitchen and chamber for the family, and, too rarely, as the painter's studio.

The three-legged stool groaned as Gilla sat down, set a small sack on the table, and began with ostentatious precision to shell peas into a bowl. Late afternoon sunlight shafted through the shutters, lending an illusory splendour to the tarnished brocade against which his models used to pose, and leaving in obscurity the baskets of soiled clothing which the wives of the rich and respectable (terms which were, in Sanctuary, roughly synonymous) had graciously given to Gilla to wash.

Once, Lalo would have rejoiced in the play of light and shadow, or at least reflected ironically on the relationship between illusion and reality. But he was too familiar with the poverty the shadows hid - the sordid truth behind all his fantasies. The only place he now saw visions was at the bottom of a jug of wine.

He got up stiffly, brushing ineffectually at the blue paint smeared across the old stains on his tunic. He knew that he should clean up the pigments spilling across the floor, but why try to save paint when no one wanted his pictures?

By now the regulars would be drifting into the Vulgar Unicom. No one would care about his clothing there.

Gilla looked up as he started towards the door, and the light restored her greying hair to its former gold, but she did not speak. Once, she would have run to kiss her husband good-bye, or railed at him to keep him home. Only, as Lalo stumbled down the stairs, he heard behind him the vicious splatter of peas hitting the cracked glaze of the bowl.

Lalo shook his head and took another sip of wine, carefully, because the tankard was almost empty now. 'She used to be beautiful...' he said sadly. 'Would you believe that she was like Eshi, bringing spring back into the world?' He peered muzzily through the shadows of the Vulgar Unicorn at Cappen Varra, trying to superimpose on the minstrel's saturnine features the dimly remembered image of the golden-haired maiden he had courted almost twenty years ago. But he could only remember the scorn in Gilla's grey eyes as she had glared down at him that afternoon. She was right. He was despicable - wine had bloated his belly as his ginger hair had thinned, and the promises he had once made her were as empty as his purse.

Cappen Varra tipped back his dark head and laughed. Lalo caught the gleam of his white teeth in the guttering lamplight, a flicker of silver from the amulet at his throat, the elegant shape of his head against the chiaroscuro of the Inn. Dim figures beyond him turned at the sound, then returned to the even murkier business that had brought them there.

'Far be it from me to argue with a fellow-artist -' said Cappen Varra, 'but your wife reminds me of a rhinoceros! Remember when you got paid for decorating Master Regli's foyer, and we went to the Green Grape to celebrate? I saw her when she came after you... Now I know why you do your serious drinking here!'