Uneasy alliances - Thieves World 11 (10 page)

"He was seventeen, pig."

Slowly, through the afternoon streets, still in drizzling rain, the shops'

business slow, the citizens who did find reason to be out on the streets moving about all muffled up in cloaks.

But no few stared at the sight of a Stepson with a black-cloaked woman riding pillion behind him, slowly and deliberately through street and street and street; and a one-eyed man beside them, where Stepsons had searched frantically all day, and rousted citizens and searched warehouses.

Perhaps it was the fey, dire feeling about them, that coursed through Strafs bones and set his teeth on edge.

"Wrong," Stilcho said softly, above the soft clip and clop of hooves on cobbles. "Wrong—"

"Is it me you see?" Ischade whispered. "Or else?"

"I don't know," Stilcho said hollowly, in a voice which itself could raise the hair's at a man's nape.

"Hereabouts," Ischade whispered. "Hereabouts. Steady, Straton. Don't flinch."

He felt something at his back—felt it, like fire and ice, burning through

his armor, into his bones. And suddenly the horse whickered and gave a thrust of its hindquarters, skittering forward and taking an undirected turn into an alley, into a maze of balconies and rubbish and discarded barrels. It was crazed. It headed them up a nook and stopped, facing a dead end.

"Here," Ischade said.

'Where?" Blank walls surrounded them, windowless, doorless. Strat looked about them in desperation, and twisted about as Ischade slid down.

"The horse knows. It has the scent."

He dismounted and dropped the reins, drawing his sword, looking above them, for some window, any aperture.

The horse pawed the cobbles, put down its head and nosed the rubbish. Above a hinged iron plate set in the cobbles.

"Damn," Strat said. "Damn."

And dropped to his knees and pulled at it with his fingers. It would not move.

"Bolted," he said. "Dammitall!" Desperation welled up in him. Blue fire ran around the opening, down the hinges, dim in daylight. Metal grated.

"Now," Ischade said.

He pulled and it lifted.

And the sound, the half-human sound that came from somewhere in the depths, ran right through his nerves.

He did not stop. He saw the steps and he went, writhed his way through a hole too small for a man to take easily, down into the echoing dark.

"Stilcho!" he heard Ischade whisper urgently. He heard the slither of someone behind him, but another such moan wrenched at his gut. He felt his way down and down, one hand for the sword, one for the wall, his eyes straining at dark absolute except the little gray light that got through from the open trap above, and that fitful, with his partners leaning over it.

He heard laughter echoing through the vault, soft and awful, coming from everywhere.

And caught himself with his heart in his throat as his foot missed a step and he saved himself at an unexpected landing. There was a chain there. He grasped it and felt it to find the steps, descending again, till he

heard the sound in front of himHe felt ahead of him with his sword, probing the dark till it suddenly touched stone. He felt either side and found nothing, and, with his bare hand, in front of him, and felt a wooden door. He put his ear against it.

And pulled it open, carefully, carefully as dim lamplight spilled against

his eye.

". . . friend," he heard.

And a sound hardly human at all.

He saw a light, old columns, watermarked, a pair of figures low to the ground against a mound of dirt. He eased his way in, flexing his hand on his sword-hilt, hardly daring to breathe.

The damned hinge creaked. The man looked around.

"Haiiii!" Strat yelled, for what shock could do, and was halfway across the room before the man jerked Crit up by the hair and brought the point of a dagger right up under Crit's left eye.

"You want him blinded? Drop it! Drop the sword!" 266 UNEASY ALLIANCES

Cnt tried to say something Fool, probably And arched his back and struggled as the knife jabbed

"Drop it'"

Strat dropped it, and saw the man drop the knife and snatch twohanded at something in the straw beside him, but he was already moving, launched with all his strength and speed across that intervening space—

Crossbow Cut's Firing The bolt tore into him He spun with it, staggered and kept moving, clawing his way up again, tearing the dagger from his belt, hurling himself and the weapon missilelike against the man

with the spent bow

He hit the man in the gut, he felt that, felt the rush of blood over his hand, the tumble of threshing limbs tangled with his as he went down with the bolt shocked by the fall and the dark closing around him

"I couldn't stop it," Stilcho said "I couldn't reach him—" Ischade held up her hand, dismissal, absolution—whatever Stilcho would accept—and looked down at the carnage that spread blood through the straw

"Witch—" Cnt said, or tried to say, looking at her through the one eye that still would work It came out a raven's croak And after so much else, he spat at her

"Gratitude Of course." Straton washer concern She tucked her robes away from the blood that was everywhere and felt of his back and his neck, where a pulse still beat The bolt had hit high The bad shoulder Again.

"Damn you," Cnt whispered, "damn you to hell, let him be." She touched Strat's face when Stilcho had turned him over He was bloody everywhere. He was half-conscious, and he tried to say something, but she touched his lips and his brow and put him to sleep She did

other things too, and bent and kissed him on the brow and on the lips, bloody as he was

"Let him be, you damned ghoul'"

Somewhere Cntias had found that much voice, and struggled to an elbow, to try to throw his body into her, if only that She whirled and stopped him, her hand on his throat, and flung him back down, spat at again

But she restrained herself "He came after you He came to me for you But you will not remember that " She held him with her eyes only now, cut him free with the knife she drew from the dead man, then put her joined hands to Cnt's face, and let the mage-fire flow, mending the eye, the hands, everything that might cripple a man "Sleep, Cntias " It was part of her curse and her talent, that mesmeric talent that could

erase her very passage from a mind, make seeing eyes blind, create elaborate memories that had never been

Such, largely, had been her affair with Strat until she began to take risks, with Stilcho to die his deaths, assuage her needs, fulfill the

curse

"Come," she said to Stilcho, taking him by the hand "We have Mona to see to Cnt will take care of things "

And drew Stilcho with her, hesitating at the last, bewildered, surely But she turned his face to her with a touch of her finger, and erased his

memory of this place, before she led him up to the light It was luck, surely, that a searcher spotted Strat's bay horse m an alley

searchers had been down a dozen times that day, spotted the trap left up,

and investigated, all on a hunch that had come on the man even to go down that often-searched alley Cnt had run out of strength, dragging Strat's half-conscious weight toward the stairs, collapsing there in the dark with Strat damned near bleeding to death and the stairs yet to go. After that it was horse litters to get them as far as the guard-barracks infirmary, Cnt more exhausted and bruised and with cracked ribs that bandages could help, Strat the worse off of the two of them. Strat, who had come through for him and done what he had done, before the damned IIsigi lunatic had had time to carve him up Strat, who had distracted the killer and taken the bolt, knowing he was going to take

it, because that was the only way to get across that distance and knife the

bastard that was going to cut Cnt's throat.

Strat had had enough strength left m him to cut Cnt loose And then fainted

Cnt ought to have been in his own bed He was not He sat by Strat's, just holding onto his arm, thinking, damn, he would go to the witch by riverside, he would go down there and he would beg if that was what it took The sight of Strat deliberately distracting that bastard, deliberately

taking the shot and still having it in him to aim true and hard—would haunt him, like the thing Strat had said when he managed, m his pain, to cut him loose—

"—damn mess, Cnt, damn awful mess How'd you get into this^" It was Strat the way he had been Strat before the witch had got him. Strat his partner

And Strat did much the same thing when finally he came to and found him sitting there, with the candle all but a stub on the bedside table

"What the hell," he said "I must've made it all nght, didn't P"

Jon DeCles

"I am afraid, my dear, that we are going to get into some trouble over this play," said Glisselrand, picking up another ball of brightly colored

yam and adding its lurid yellow to the dark fuschia with which she had been working all morning. Her knitting was the one evidence of her past that she had not dropped along the way, the closest thing to a regret that

she had ever shown in all the years since she had run away from home to become an actress with the travelling players.

"And why should that be, my sweeting?" asked Feltheryn, going over the lines of the play before him, intermittently sipping at the tisane in his

cup.

"Well, you may have been too busy to listen to gossip, but the thing most discussed in this dreadful town is the possible marriage of Prince Kittycat to the Beysa," Glisselrand replied, her voice just a little more

reedy this morning than Feltheryn liked. "Has it not occurred to you that

this particular play which Molin Torchholder has commissioned us to perform might be taken as a political statement?"

"How so?" asked Feltheryn, devoting only a part of his mind to the conversation.

"It depicts an unsuccessful marriage of state, for one thing," said Glisselrand. "For another, there is that very powerful scene in which the High Priest forces the King to his will. One assumes the words were written originally at a time when the King of some country was overstepping his bounds, and when the magician who wrote it felt it appropriate to bend the will of the monarch to the wisdom of the temple."

"Well, yes," said Feltheryn, looking up at last from the old parchment

text of the play. His blue eyes focused on Giisselrand and he was struck,

as always, by how beautiful she remained, even at - . .—Certainly more summers than was polite for a man to consider. (At least past fifty.)

"But

what has that to do with thee and me?"

"Feltheryn, my darling," Glisselrand said patiently, "you know how the plays affect people's minds. Has it not occurred to you that Molin might be attempting to use us to get control of the prince?"

"My darling," said Feltheryn, "the plays are magical, there is no doubt about that. But their magic is unpredictable. Surely Molin, as a priest, knows that he cannot depend on a performance of one of our plays to give him any precise results. The changes that occur in people upon seeing our plays are subtle, and like as not they will even go unnoticed.

Molin saw the plays in Ranke. He knows they cannot be used, I am sure.

. . . You must think more kindly of this fine man who has been good enough to arrange a theater for us, hire that charming painter, Lalo, to paint our scenery, and, most important, see that we are all fed until we are established in Sanctuary."

"Perhaps," said Glisselrand after a moment. "But-1 do wonder at you, even after this many years. You are still such an innocefft! I wonder how

you maintain it."

This comment left Feltheryn bewildered so he returned to his memorizing of the text; a very normal reaction, as much of what his beloved leading lady said to him was beyond his understanding. In a moment he was absorbed again in the terrible scene in which the king discovers that

his new young wife is in love with his son by a previous marriage. Feltheryn moved his hand to his brow and ran his fingers through his bushy white hair in rehearsal of a gesture of anguish. He did not notice Glisselrand's tender smile as she watched him.

The company had lost many of its treasured articles of production in its final days in Ranke, and as The Power of Kings was a play replete with

royalty, it behooved Feltheryn to replace certain crowns, sceptres, and other paraphernalia of rulership. To this end he headed for the bazaar of

Sanctuary, accompanied by Snegelringe, who would play his son Karel in the play (Feltheryn always reserved the parts of kings for himself and left

the younger, more romantic parts for his junior) and Lempchin, the boy who acted as factotum to the troupe. They were looking for a blacksmith, but one who had a certain flair and style about his work; for crowns and sceptres were a far cry, artistically, from horseshoes and barrel hoops. It was perhaps inevitable that they catch the attention of those who frequented the bazaar by day but who made their homes in either the Downwind or the Maze; for after so many years of being a king upon the stage Feltheryn moved with the authority of one, if not the wisdom.

270

Certainly no true king would have been foolish enough to head for the bazaar with only one guard and a clumsy boy for company. It was luck, and very good luck, that the first to make an attempt upon the old actor's person was not one of Sanctuary's better thieves: otherwise the purse which Molin Torchholder had provided might have been lost. As it was; the apprentice pickpockets crashed into Feltheryn, the

"master" of the gang (who had attained at least eighteen years despite his

stupidity) rushed in with a knife—and learned quickly that actors must be as good with their swords in reality as upon the stage. Snegelringe's blade flew from its overly ornamented scabbard, moved in an overly flamboyant arc, and the attacking knife flew from a hand that spurted blood.