Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune

Dark of the Moon Andrew Offutt

In the final night of its waning the moon was a mere pale sliver that played hide-and-seek among the few blue-gray clouds lounging above the fired old town called Sanctuary. The lone walker under that pallid excuse for a moon was in her late teens or perhaps early twenties.

She did not look nearly as stupid as she did attractive, and yet here she was, a pretty-enough young woman demonstrating a contra-survival lack of intelligence and good judgment by turning down the paved narrowness of an alleged street well shadowed by multistory tenements. Why did not she, even as a foreigner to Sanctuary, at least suspect that she had entered a cul-de-sac forming one of the most dangerous traps any city could provide?

Lurking here in a less-than-savory area of the town named Sanctuary and sometimes sarcastically referred to as Thieves’ World, the alley whimsically called Sunshine Street existed for two blocks only. Its narrow length was mostly unlit and barely wide enough for the passage of a one-horse cart. Little sound invaded such a narrow walkway between tall tenements. The dying moon was a mere sickle in its final quarter, but happened to be almost directly overhead. Thus it lit the alley well enough to make it possible to distinguish only the brightest colors.

Perhaps that bright light dulled the suspicions of the lone walker—and perhaps also dulled her mind? At any rate, it also created many shadows and lurking places, and they yielded two men.

Chestnut brown of eye and of hair with a mild tendency to curl, the prey was more than comely. The predators were not, and both were considerably larger than her height and build. Both men wore dark clothing and sharp steel and neither was small. The smaller or rather less large accoster was neither good-looking nor ugly of face capped by wispy, hair-colored hair. He wore his soft cap of dark red at a jaunty angle that he probably felt made him rakishly attractive, a belief without foundation. The larger one had a large, dark brown growth of hair that wandered over the whole lower part of his face—not a beard, really, for that implied some gardening. Unfortunately the area concealed by that foliage did not include his nose, an unsightly growth that some might have likened to a truncated sausage.

“Just be a good little dummy and hand over that pretty-pretty bracelet, girl,” the larger one said, clutching a gentle moon of breast through her clothing, “and we won’t kill you after the rape.”

Her valiant struggling was to absolutely no avail against their strength. The night air was ripped by the sound of gasps, grunts, scraping footsteps, and tearing cloth. The outcome of that worse-than-uneven struggle was not in question.

“Damn!” the smaller of the two attackers said—not a small man at all, under his rakishly canted cap, but his hair-faced companion was a veritable bear. That accounted for his nickname, which was Wall. He wrested their prey against his namesake with a heavy sound of the impact of her left shoulder and arm and the squeak that forcible contact brought from her throat. Even so she sent a kick high up between the legs of the cap-wearer and did her best to bite the arm of the one who had the better grip on her.

“That there is gonna cost you the use of that leg for a long time,” he snarled, close to her ear—which was tickled by his veritable jungle of dark brown facial hair.

Alone in the unlighted street all three participants froze at the sound of a quiet voice from an unseen source. Sounding calm, it wafted down to them from above. Three heads jerked upward and three pair of night-large pupils stared.

“You don’t really mean to be doing this, boys,” that same voice said, as if stating plain fact that all should know. “You two just stop that nastiness and go along your way and maybe you’ll get to see the sunrise.”

Adrenaline spurted. Hairs rose abristle on two napes; the fine chestnut hairs on the back of the young woman’s neck were already erect. Squatting almost at the very edge of the roof a few feet above them in seeming supreme confidence was a slender youth little beyond his boyhood. Partly because of his squat and partly because his clothing was uniformly darker than that of the assailants, he did not look at all large. The silver slice of moon was high above his right shoulder, making his face a featureless shadow while affording him a clear view of the features, at least, of all three land-bound members of the encounter.

The bigger of the pair of assailants chuckled. “H’lo there, little feller. Careful you don’t fall off that there roof. You really think you can handle us both?” Without haste, he reached across the area where his tunic bloused over his belt buckle. There hung a sheath of unadorned old leather. From it he slid a knife as long as his thigh.

The level, quiet voice did not change, nor did the shadow-man move. “I really think I can handle you both without raising a sweat, you big cow.”

This time it was the other man who fouled the night with the sound of his voice. “You’re talking to Wall, and he’s a bull, not a cow, you froggin’ piece of shite!”

“Careful. I’ve heard both those stupid words so damned much in the past few weeks from too damned many copycats. I swore to carve the nose off any fraggin’ piece of bat-shite who used both at once.”

The big man chuckled again. He had made no move to lift his long knife. “Who in the seven hells are you, boy?”

The chosen victim of the arrogant pair was doing her best to edge away. Shadows beckoned …

And yet even she froze at the reply of the would-be rescuer on the roof.

“I am called Shadowspawn.”

“Sheeeeee-ite!”

“Not likely. My daddy knowed that oddling called Shadow-spawn. If that freggin’ super-thief is alive, he’s got to be older than rocks.”

The youth on the roof was not above theatricality in heaving a great sigh. “You’ve had your warning, ugly. A wise man once told me that a fool and his life are soon parted. You don’t have to go proving that.”

The man who was not as large as his companion grabbed their chosen victim by means of hooking a hairy and muscular arm across her throat. From behind her and above her head he glowered up at the accoster.

“I’d say you’re the one about to prove it, you fruggin’ shike!” he said. “Git far away from here and do it fast, or I break her scrawny neck.”

The squatting human shadow on the roof’s edge said, “Still making foolish noises, are you? Seems to me it’s a very pretty neck. Well, I warned you.”

And then in a blurred movement his hand rushed up and back and then forward, his lower forearm just brushing his ear. The result was that the wide-eyed prisoner heard the little humming sound that terminated in a metallic shing accompanying a thud. Of course she was not able to see the way the forehead below the soft red cap sprouted a silvery-shining steel throwing star. Four and a half points were in evidence, meaning that one and half of another were mostly imbedded. Yes, even in bone.

“Your pond-scum fool of a friend has just joined his dog-relatives in the Cold Hell, big cow,” the roof-squatter said, low. “Are you ready to join him and them?”

The big man turned out to be not as stupid as he looked. Without pausing to consider, he ran

The far from conventional hero of the little affray dropped down just as the victim, released by the fall of the man behind her, also sank to the pave. The shoulder of her mint-green tunic was torn to what most male observers would consider an interesting degree. She stared up at her rescuer from large dark eyes widened by wonder. He was nowhere near the size of the beast he had just frightened off. He was also positively bristling with sharp steel in various lengths.

“You … you saved me—a stranger!” She spoke those wondering words in an accent that was not born in Sanctuary.

He shrugged, and squatted beside her to look into a pretty, oval face that tapered down to an almost pointed chin. And oh, what skin! “True.”

She gazed up into a dusky face with features that made him appear to be in his teens. Except for the eyes. Strangely old, those eyes were, and accustomed to seeing ugliness. He was not a bad-looking youth, her hero, with a sensuous mouth, hooded eyes, and shaped brows. He wore unalleviated black, as if his goal was to be a living shadow, and his jet hair had not been cut in at least two years. It was pulled back into a horse-tail, pulled through a short, narrow sheath of dark leather.

“Did you k—is he dead?”

“Likely.”

“Are you really called Shadowspawn?”

“No. Shadowspawn is my mentor. My name is Lone.” In the large-eyed presence of an attractive and grateful young woman with golden skin more beautiful than any he had ever seen, he could not resist adding, “Some call me Catwalker. Are you ready to stand?”

“I … think so …”

Lone took her hand in a warm one with a rough surface. He noted that it was a small and quite dainty hand, but that it had led no life of leisure. As he rose to his feet in an easy, athletic movement, she saw that his every fingernail had been gnawed. A soul in torment, or the usual dread uncertainty of youth? When he exerted a bit of pressure, she allowed herself to be drawn up just as fluidly—but tottered a bit when she was on her feet. How pale she was, and how thin! Her eyes looked deep-set and yet huge—and at a height to gaze directly into his unreadable dark, dark ones. This black-haired boy or very young man was not tall, and looking into those eyes made her think that he trusted no one.

“Give me a name to call you by.”

“Janithe. My name is Janithe.”

“Janithe. Why were you in this night-dark alley?”

“It—it stinks, doesn’t it? Is there a stable just ahead?”

“Does that question mean you don’t want to answer mine?”

“I—I wasn’t really going anywhere. I am—I am a stranger here.”

He already knew the answer, from her accent, but asked anyway: “In this section of town, do you mean, or in my town?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, without showing teeth. When he said nothing but continued to gaze into eyes little less enigmatic than his own, Janithe was unable to resist providing more information.

“I just arrived from Caronne. I lived with my mother. She has been a widow for over three years. A little over a month ago she took a lover, and the moment she left for work he came after me. I know she likes him, a lot, and I love her and wish her happiness, and so I left. I came here to seek work …”

Lone left off saying that the only thing he knew that came from Caronne was the drug krrf and its deadly distillate. He did state his surmise: “And you have no money.”

She looked down.

“Lots of people haven’t,” he said as a kindness, in a voice with a shrug built in. It was so hard not to stare at her, with that beautiful, somehow glowing golden skin! “No one remembers the name of this excuse for a street, Janithe. It is used as often for the emptying of bladders as anything else, and hereabouts it’s well know as the Drainway. It ends less than a block ahead.”

“But it started just over a block back!”

“True.” His face did not change. “Do you want to tell me about that bracelet?” He indicated the long and exceptionally handsome ornament, which was at least plated with gold. What a strange set of curlicues it bore, and runes! In seconds her rescuer surreptitiously gave Janithe’s one item of jewelry the close examination of an expert thief. “That should bring you the price of lodging until you find work. Just a loan on it, even.”

She drew back in some alarm and grasped her braceleted forearm with the other hand. That told Lone that she was horrified or something like, and he decided with a mental shrug that either it had great sentimental meaning to her—or maybe she just could not get the thing off. He turned in the direction whence she had come.

“Coming?”

Janithe hastened to walk beside him along a street that might have accommodated one more person abreast. “I owe you more than money,” she murmured in a soft, more composed voice. “Why on earth were you up on that roof?”

Her rescuer made an unextravagant gesture. “Obviously it’s safer to travel by roof than by street!”

He was pleased that she giggled. “B—but—aren’t you afraid of failing?”

“No. My mentor put it best—‘it’s not the fall that a person needs to fear, but the sudden stop.’”

He was rewarded with another girlish giggle and was minded to tell her the story that Chance-who-had-been-Hanse had told him, with some relish. The sad tale involved a thief whose talent was definitely less than that of Shadowspawn—but then whose was not?

One morning near dawn this fellow, Therames, Shadowspawn said his name was, truly surpassed himself in laboriously ascending to the very top of a flat-roofed building in a neighborhood peopled by the well-off, and from it leaped to the slightly lower roof of another building, which he had judged unscalable. With great care and little speed he worked his way down to a window, and inside to his goal, which turned out to be a particularly nice evening’s take. He was almost discovered, eluded the almost-discoverer, and emerged laden with eminently salable and pawnable booty. So laden that the heavy sack’s weight forced Therames to grunt and pant his way back up onto the roof of that building. So laden was he, in fact, that when he made his sinuous pounce back to the first building, his sack of loot o’erweighed him and he fell five storeys to break his neck. Police of the city watch retrieved him and his loot. They kept the latter …

But Lone did not relate that to this interesting girl or woman, for she was speaking, posing still another question: “Why did you call yourself Shadowspawn?”

“If those two had any sense, it should have scared the snot out of them. Shadowspawn is my mentor, the greatest cat-burglar in the world, and a ferocious foe in a fight. Terribly good with knives of any length. Oh, fart.” He stopped and turned back. “I can be so stupid! I forgot something important! Stand right here where we can be sure you’re safe.” As he spoke he was tucking Janithe into a deep shadow at the wall of the leftward building. “You’re all but invisible in the shadow. I left something back there. I’ll be back faster than you can draw three breaths.”

That was not quite true, for extracting a death-star from the armoring bone of a man’s forehead was no simple task. By the time Lone had wiggled the steel star-shape free and reattached it prominently to his clothing—incidentally removing the undernourished purse from inside the dead man’s tunic—and hurried back to where he had left her, Janithe was nowhere in sight.

“Fart,” Lone muttered, partly because he was impressed, in addition to the dismay he could not help feel. He kept a close eye on the shadows as he departed the Drainway, but no, that was the way his mentor of the apt nickname vanished, but it was not the hiding place of Janithe.

The master mage Kusharlonikas was not at all pleased to receive the brief letter. Indeed the boy who delivered it should have thanked his stars that he was well away before the aged mage plucked open the message with withered old fingers, and read it. It was signed by four men who were sufficiently well-off and thus powerful enough to ignore or at least pretend to ignore the putative ruler of Sanctuary this decade, the gr-r-reat noble Arizak: two bankers, a man of the law who owned not only considerable rental property but a glass manufactory as well, and the white mage named Strick and called Spellmaster. Kusharlonikas perceived the “advisory” as an insult and a challenge. He had now lived into his one-hundred-second year, and was no fool. He had no doubt that it was that meddling, grotesquely fat do-gooder Strick who had instigated and probably dictated this letter.

True; it told him nothing he did not know: that his apprentice was an incompetent whose attempts at casting spells had caused alarm and even physical harm to persons and things unknown to him; innocents to whom neither he nor his master meant any harm. Interesting, Kusharlonikas thought, that this little band of long-nosed do-gooders knew some specifics, including a couple of events unknown even to Kusharlonikas until this moment. One or more of these men had seen weird occurrences in a watering hole he had never heard of, and the ghastly ruination of a cat and a couple of vendors’ stands in the city market.

The aged master mage was advised to “take action in this matter. Perhaps he might be well advised to rethink his choice of apprentices?”

His Master Mageship was unamused and unpersuaded, but not unaffected. How dare these turds chastise and challenge him! A while later, in the quiet and ever-shielded privacy of his Chamber of Reflection and Divination, he condemned the message to a slow burning as he stood over it and murmured quiet words while making a series of abbreviated, long-practiced gestures. Oddly, a name he used in his dreadsome incantation was not one of those who had signed the meddlesome letter that so angered him.

By strange coincidence that same afternoon, two young men chanced to come face to face in that same widesprawling marketplace. Of course they were far from alone in this sprawling collection of tents and stalls, which was alive with myriad colors and shadings and the mingled scents of food of all kinds and people and the discordant sound of more voices than anyone could ever want to hear—in at least as many accents as the number of fingers on two hands.

Lone had attended the arena games back during the eeriness of the mantling of both the sun and the moon within a few days. He came away with purses numbering rather more than two. He had half fallen in love with the stare-provokingly saffron-skinned warrior maid who called her diminutive, swifter-than-an-arrow-in-flight self “Tiger.” But she was no less dangerous than speedy, and Lone realized that it was only lust he had fallen into, not the perilous morass of love. No matter; ’twas a temporary fancy that took not long to pass, while the purses he had so deftly acquired came only from smiling men—and one overly ostentatious woman—who had collected some of the many, many wagers made on the outcome of every contest

But how the skin of Janithe reminded him of that warrior woman!—and everyone knew that nearly everyone in Sanctuary visited the sprawling market sometime. So—he stopped at this stall or kiosk and that, and asked about her, and left word that if anyone saw her he would like to know. No one was rude; the never unpleasant youth was too obvious in his cute infatuation with some exotic-to-him girl come here from off somewhere, and what human of any age could resist such a non-phenomenal phenomenon as young love?

And now this confrontation with Komodoflorensal. It was the apprentice sorcerer who happened to be moving the faster of the two, and so the apprentice cat-burglar stopped dead still and allowed the other to bump him. They were not friends and yet not strangers, for they had met once before … one night not so long ago, in the Chamber of Reflection and Divination of Kusharlonikas the mage.

The one with the roundish, seemingly ingenuous face wearing a longish tunic the color of bile was Komodoflorensal, apprentice to the master mage. The youth of about the same age with the hooded eyes, several weapons, and more sensible blue tunic over leggings the color of a bay horse was the self-named Lone, who in spite of his swagger and desire for arrogance, was apprentice to the master thief Shadowspawn. Seeming only to be meandering, he had asked several people, both vendor and shopper, about an attractive young woman with golden skin, a foreigner with the unusual name of Janithe. No one admitted to knowing anything of her, even of having seen such a person.

“Uh! Oh! Sorry—”

“Hell-o, sorcerer’s apprentice!”

“Uh-oh. You!” Neither of the young men was tall, and Komodoflorensal had to look up only a little above Lone’s expensive red-and-beige sash to meet his dark, dark eyes with his own large, round, medium browns.

“Aye. Me. As you and your master know, the name is Lone. I have heard yours pronounced, but am not sure I can imitate the noise.”

The smaller youth snapped, “I am Komodoflorensal and you well know it, thief! You of all people have no call to be insulting! Last I saw of you, you were fleeing with goods stolen from my master’s innermost chamber.”

Lone swallowed the name-calling—after all, it merely described his chosen profession—and his retort. “I don’t remember fleeing, but of course you must have got an odd view, considering that you was hiding under your master’s spelling table and trying to think of what went wrong with the spell you tried on me.”

“Would you two boys mind taking your little chat out of the very center of the aisle so the rest of us can be about our business?”

The pair of “chatters” turned in the direction of the unpleasant voice to see that their accoster was a woman of some years and many pounds, wearing a couple of garishly striped garments that must have contained enough cloth to make a good-sized tent. Her face made her appear to have applied the entire stock of cosmetics of some happy vendor.

“Oh my beautiful lady!” Lone said, accompanying a sweeping gesture with a profound bow. “I apologize most profusely for my younger brother and me for getting in the way of your august self. I can beg only that you forgive us, two men who have not seen each other in all these years since our mother sold us to a hideous catamite with a stenchy stable full of horses fed far better than ourselves were, these fourteen years agone.”

Both his alleged brother and the offended woman stared at him, but only one of them turned aside to hide a smile that broadened into a grin.

Looking chastened by such politesse, however exaggerated, and guilty, and charmed—and perhaps smitten—the un-beautiful un-lady apologized for speaking so unkindly to “two poor unfortunates,” and Lone apologized again, with florid words and flourishes, and this time Komodoflorensal laughed openly, whereupon he apologized, and then Lone made solemn apology for his younger (“much younger”) brother and she apologized again and …

“Could you three babbling idiots get your butts out of the middle of the fraggin’ aisle so the rest of the world can be about our business?!”

Lone and Komodoflorensal exchanged a startled look at the sound of that rough male voice, before turning their heads in its direction. They were just in time to see their previous accoster explode her fist into the approximate center of the face of the voice’s owner, a large, soft-faced man in his thirties.

“You should long since have learned the virtues of patience!” she stormed as he staggered back, and with a brief but not discourteous nod to the two young men she took for brothers, she bustled on her way.

The large fellow whose nose she had messily flattened flopped backward into a woman who was using a bolt or so of yellow cloth with enormous green polka dots to carry her child of a very few months. The infant’s father proved not to have learned the virtues of patience. Turning the offending man with one hand, he gave him a hard backhanded slap with the other. The noise of impact was loud. The yelp of the recipient was not, and this time as he staggered back a tight-clad leg with a pronounced calf muscle was waiting. He was so obliging as to stumble over it. The hapless wight went backward down onto his butt.

“Well done,” Komodoflorensal remarked.

“Thank you,” Lone said. “And might I suggest that this is a good place to be away from!”

Komodoflorensal agreed, and they made some haste in swerving into a different aisle between tents and stalls and kiosks. In mere moments they had blended into its throng.

“I do admire the way you overdid apologizing to that old bird and charmed her,” the open-faced youth said, as they ambled along, inhaling the many, many scents—most of them pleasant. “Were you really sold by your mother?”

“No,” Lone said. “She was murdered, with my father.”

“Unbelievable!” the mage’s apprentice burbled. “That is my story, too!”

The face of the young thief called Catwalker did not change, but his mind did. “Strange,” he said, “but believable enough. I was adopted … eventually.”

“Again, me too!” the excited youth in green said. “Except that it was my great-great-uncle who adopted me. I had seen him but once in my life.”

“Kusharlonikas,” Lone said.

“Aye. Uncle ’Lonikas. Have you been treated badly? By your adopter, I mean.”

“Never by them!” Lone staunchly replied, and it did not occur to him to ask the same question of the ignorant enemy at his side, who seemed so much younger than he was.

After some three steps, Komodoflorensal volunteered the information: “Well I have. I have been tortured in various ways, and even killed.”

Lone jerked but did not stop. “What? Killed?”

“Some of it was illusion and some of it was not. The six times I’ve been killed never really happened.”

While Lone’s mind wrestled with that spectacular revelation, a smallish red-brown dog with droplets falling from its lolling, oddly spatulate tongue brushed his left leg. Strangely, it was the leg between him and his unchosen companion.

Lone was far more interested in Komodoflorensal’s thoughts and memories: While Lone had been tortured and beaten, more than once nearly to death, always the important word had been nearly. At last, after swerving around a little girl whose arm was held almost straight up by a mother laden with fresh fruits, he asked, “What’s it like, dyin’?”

Since Komodoflorensal was at that moment jostled against him, Lone felt the other orphan’s shudder. “Horribler than anything you can imagine.”

The survivor of the tortures and mind-assaults of the Dyareelan Pits made no comment on that. What could be more horrible than Strangle and his minions, and their treatment of the children they had worked so diligently to transform into heartless murderers?

But! According to this fellow whose name was the biggest part about him, he had once been strangled not only into unconsciousness—as Lone had been, back when he was called Flea-shit because he was that inconsequential—but to death! The implement of the slow murder of the sorcerer’s apprentice that time was a serpent-sinuous demon; the reason was that Komodoflorensal had used a Finding Out spell and somehow sucked a bit of information from the lore-stuffed brain of his mentor. No more than an iota of that vast store, true, but Kusharlonikas was not one to observe such niceties as making punishment match offense. As always, Komoetcetera awoke “from death” alive and hale, but never to forget the terror and horror of the experience.

By an hour past noon the two unlikely companions had purchased and shared food and drink and exchanged many words. No, Komodoflorensal had not seen anyone matching Janithe’s description; yes, he would be on the watch, and leave word for Lone at the vendor’s kiosk they agreed upon.

They were probably the same age, or nearly, as they were similar in height with Lone maybe a finger-width taller; his adoptive mother had assigned him a birthday, more arbitrarily than not. The date made him a few months older than the other apprentice. Strangely and despite himself, Komodoflorensal could not help feeling that he had indeed met a brother and one who was both older and quite respectworthy in spite of his occupation. Later it occurred to him that he had been told not as much as a few lines of the dark Catwalker’s life.

They parted because both had business and places to be. By then the same dog had passed close to them twice more.

Lone’s destination was not at all far. In the bright sunlight of early afternoon he made his way through the noisy throng. Along the way he enlisted the agreement of several additional vendors to be alert to someone who might be Janithe.

His rambling way led to the permanent stall of a bright and ever cheerful woman who identified herself as Saylulah. Word was that she had once been attached to a Rankan noble and had fallen to this low estate of seamstresspeddler, but who ever knew what was true about the things said about this individual or that?

Especially in the town that all too many people sneeringly called Thieves’ World!

Yesterday Lone had picked out a tunic from Saylulah’s supply of ready-mades. Naturally most people made their own attire or, if they were sufficiently well off, had their clothing made to measure. Single males did exist, however, and people with other handicaps that prevented them from sewing, and so even in Sanctuary a market existed for serviceable clothing at a moderate price. Or less, for Saylulah also had available a few used tunics and cloaks. The very cheapest were those with patched rents, some “decorated” with brown stains that the new wearer could claim were his or her own blood …

Yesterday Lone had chosen a moderately priced item, and bartered a bit of ill-gotten gains for a nice but in no way fancy tunic. It was of a well-woven red fabric that had cleverly been dyed, tedded, and cured so as not to look new. It was a bit long for a tunic—particularly for a young man—but not quite a robe. Lone asked the vendor, also a seamstress, to “fancy it up” as he put it, by sewing a stripe around the garment’s hem. Saylulah suggested dark green and he agreed, for the intended recipient was a dull dresser and should welcome a bit of color. Because she was Saylulah, he had committed the strange act of handing over the price in advance, with the agreement that the finished garment would be ready by this morning. No matter that he did not appear at her stall with its green-and-beige-and-yellow awning until after noon.

As a favor today, she also wrapped the additional item he bore.

He carried the packages with him to his regularly scheduled session with the weapon master designated by Chance. Lone and the other orphan boys in the Pits had been inculcated with the concept of remorseless killing without necessity or even reason, but the cluster of trainers had not included a true master of the long blade. According to the man who had been the renowned Shadowspawn, Sathentris from far Ketharvven was the master of swordmasters in Sanctuary.

He and his student parried and swung and dodged and feinted—and ran!—for a full run of the glass before the swordmaster set up a quarter-hourglass and Lone devoted that period to left-handed swordwork, mostly defense. He was not as good this way, of course, since he had not been born left-handed but persisted in training himself to be, in emulation of his idol Shadowspawn.

Sathentris the Keth was not a man given to praising those he taught, but today he was apparently unable to refrain from expressing satisfaction beyond approval. At the end of their approximate hour and a half together his youngest student went away barely curbing a smile that wanted to be a smirk. With the new tunic and another smaller, secret package then, Lone went to visit Heliz Yunz.

As he expected, the churlish genius from Lirt greeted him in manner unfriendly—and in the same tired, faded old once-red cassock made more colorful by buttons of two descriptions and several un-matching patches, in magenta.

The act of robbing a pitifully few coins from Arizak’s keep as a favor to Strick had been an obscenely pleasurable experience for Lone. During that dangerous lark the thief in the palace had naturally taken a little something for himself. The slim bronze tablet he had chanced upon showed four parallel columns of words, each column in a different language—a sort of dictionary? At once he had thought of how such an object would light the eyes of one Heliz Yunz into incandescence, and so Lone added it to his puny loot to take to the man he thought of respectfully as a better-than-well-educated scribe—well, and a wise eccentric, too.

After all, Lone had availed himself of Heliz’s services more than once, and with this thing—whichy from Arizak’s keep he hoped to gain a future service or two. To it he had added, for some reason he could not have stated, the gift tunic. Better to steal the wherewithal to have it made, he had opined, than to shove at the linguist a tunic roached from someone else.

“Open this only later, please,” Lone bade the scholar, who frowned, muttered something not quite audible containing the words “silly youngster”and “nonsense.” But he accepted the softer, larger package, gave it a squeeze and Lone a look, and set it aside. His eyes did indeed light up when he beheld the mystery object from the palace, and it seemed to Lone that the man seemed almost worshipful.

He held it in both hands while he studied it, muttering something unintelligible that his visitor thought contained the words “execration text. Most interesting, most interesting,” he added, in a normal tone. “I shall study it and consult my sources and advise you as to its purpose and possible worth, Lone.”

“You don’t know what it is, then?”

“Would I have said what I said if I were sure of its identity?”

Lone looked down. Damn the man! “Sorry, O Red Scholar,” he murmured, hoping that Heliz Yunz caught the sarcasm—and with no idea as to how close he was to the truth of the identity of the man from Lirt. “Especially since I have another request …”

“Ah!” The scholar made a show of being horrified. “Another request from the impatient boy! This soft package had better contain something of value!”

For once Lone remembered the advice of both his mentor and the Spellmaster, and kept silent.

After a long while that seemed longer, “All right, then,” the other man said, with no sign of contrition. “What else is it you want to beg of me?”

Lone’s head snapped up and in an instant he had reshaped himself into a military posture. “I beg nothing from anyonel” he snapped, and added, “never!”

Heliz Yunz looked startled and more, but did not backstep, either physically or with face or words. “The word ‘never’ negates the previous statement,” he said, as if he expected his meaning to be understood by a youngster who was only just able to read and was barely able to write. “But at any rate … what else is it that you would have of me, Lone?”

Aha! He who is a Lirt called me by name rather than “boy”! “I had hoped you might find out for me anything that might be knowable about a bracelet of gold that looks like this and is this long.”

With that the youth drew a quite passable picture of the long ornament that embraced the forearm of the girl he had rescued from robbery and worse. “It looked like beaten gold,” he told Heliz, who knew this orphan lad with so much attitude did have an excellent idea for such things.

They arranged another meeting or exchange of messages, and parted with the tunic still wrapped and unidentified Damn him, Lone mused. He is always so a Lirt!

After that Lone ambled as if aimlessly, trying to be unobtrusive in looking upward to examine possible targets for a night worker on a moonless night …

In the first night of this month’s disappearance of the moon above the woods outside Sanctuary a weak excuse for a breeze only just rustled a few leaves of the trees. The trees crowded close against the small waterway that crept through the woods. The breath of air was pallid, and no more significant than the small man who sloshed out of the stream. He bore a good-sized woven sack, laden but not full, and a slim pole hand-equipped at one end with two tines about as long as two sections of his longest finger. In the darkness among the trees, his face was undefined and no one could have named the color of his faded old tunic. He wore no leggings, and his legs, short and knotty, streamed water. He carried the sack as if it was middling heavy. It was swollen here and there, and some among those lumps could be seen to move. Clearly this man had spent some hours in the stream, gigging frogs.

“Looks like you had a good night froggin’, Turgul.”

At the unexpected sound of that seemingly disembodied voice, the man from far Shitellanor jerked as if in response to the sting of an insect. “Name of the shadow god hisself, Borl, you like to scared me out of a year of my life!”

Borl, a large youth with a total of eighteen digits and fewer than twenty years, treated Turgul the Shite to his imitation of an affrighted chicken.

“Now damn it—” Turgul began.

“Aw come on, Turgul,” Borl said amiably. “Didn’t know you didn’t see me, is all. Wasn’t trying to be stealthy, neither. I thought you Shites seen everything of a dark night.”

“I see frogs well enough!”

“Looks like you seen plenty. I’ll clean ’em for a share of the meat.”

Mollified—and outweighed by fifty-something pounds directed by an undeveloped brain unlikely to develop much more—Turgul nodded. “All right. First let’s get out of these blasted woods so we don’t get no more surprises.”

With Borl towering at his side, the frogging Shite resumed his bowlegged gait along the path through the woods. They did not go far before they made camp. There Borl did indeed skin and otherwise prepare the several frogs for cooking before they approached the two men on watch at the gate. The delay was brief and the bribe a heartwarming one to Turgul and Borl; these city-bred men of the watch knew no better than to accept the uneviscerated bodies of four frogs. A few minutes later the friends entered the city, averting their smirking faces. One of the guardsmen made a note of Borl’s name and physical description, with a view toward suggesting the recruitment of such a big fellow.

That was not to be. Once Borl and Turgul finished a savory repast of frog’s legs and a bit of bread, they parted. Borl was ambling happily along with no particular goal in mind when he saw the young woman turn into the narrow, dark street called Borborygma. With no nearby lights or even a moon, the blackness in there was no less than that of a sorcerer’s heart. But the very big fellow named Borl feared little, including mere darkness.

With a little smile on his lips, he followed the sinuous progress of the slender hourglass figure into Borborygma Street. He was discovered there in the morning, not just dead but badly ripped up as by an animal too totally savage and ferocious to be possible within the city … and mutilated in a way that some folk would call unspeakable.

Violent death was far from unknown in Sanctuary. But a killing so spectacular as that of one Borl son of Borl was unusual, and cause for alarm. Was some sort of wild animal loose in the streets? Add in the ghastliness of the mutila tion, and the news spread rapidly. With so many retellings by third- and fifth- and then eighth-party sources, it took next to no time for misinformation and exaggerations to muck up the story. Business took an upward leap in the farmers’ market. Some people were here to hear and exchange gossip, and to speculate, and others to make certain they were well-stocked with food for dinner and need not venture out this night.

Among them was a youth who had done physical harm on no one last night but had gained a few salable items by means dishonest. He heard much about the man he had never known, but nothing at all about the very thin young foreign female he sought. He paid off a short-term debt with coins he had of a changer who asked no questions but was tight as an athlete’s butt, and made gifts to three people. These were jewels, in two cases, and in the third a good dagger in a nice sheath.

The dark sheath was one that Lone had acquired over a year ago; the dagger one he had carried and used since his adoption. He kept the newer and thus less sharpened one he had roached the previous evening, at the same time and in the same third-floor room wherein he picked up the ruby-and-coral earrings and the matching bracelet—which now adorned the ears and wrist of two different persons unlikely ever to be in the same place at the same time.

Late that evening in a room on the third floor of an “unscalable” tenement, he decided not to take anything because it was obvious that the resident had come upon hard times. He descended empty-handed but not unhappy. His feet had just come down on the pave when from the unlit alley to his left he heard the hideous snarling growls of an animal and then a mingling, high-voiced shriek in a human voice. Hair leaped erect on Lone’s arms and nape and he unsheathed a weapon with each hand.

With prickling scalp, he started into absolute blackness.

In two seconds he suffered an attack of intelligence, realizing that the odds strongly favored his immediate death or worse. He decided to wait and see who or what emerged from that obsidian darkness, and sheathed his long blade but kept a firm grip on the dagger and one of his throwing knives. Less than a minute later he heard feet pattering toward him in the alley, and it occurred to him that he’d have been even wiser to have ascended. Then the mad-eyed hideousness with jaws and fangs and claws and streaming hair came hurtling out of the dark. It did not even pause in bowling Lone over, but accomplished that in passing, and raced on.

Lone thought he inflicted a dagger wound, but at the same time as the pavement raised the strawberry of an abrasion on his right arm his head banged into a masonry wall and he and rational thought parted company.

The apparition was of course gone when after a few seconds Lone had got himself together and onto his feet. He bent to pick up his spanking new dagger and saw that the blade was indeed marked with fresh red blood. As he and his staggered brain lurched up the street to the nearest wellcoming light, Lone realized that the thing he had so briefly seen had been an animal that walked quite erect, on two feet. And the hips, and the bilobed chest …

“Among Sanctuary’s many troubles is that the bottom of the bottom keeps getting lower.” Those words of the white mage Strick were a plague inside his head as Lone hurried away from the bloodiest mess he had ever seen.

Before he went into the greasily lit tavern to order a large dark ale, he thought to wipe his blade on a dirty strip of cloth he found just outside the door. Twenty minutes later he and two large men with a torch retraced his steps and this time entered the alley, which naturally enough surrounded the trepid trio with the odor of ammonia. It turned out to be a veritable cul-de-sac, narrowing to a passage that would have turned back a man with a real belly, or an extra-busty woman. The doomed young man who had so foolishly entered it had walked all the way to that area. The mark of his urine was still on the wall, but Lone and his companions were staring down at a lot more blood. And horror that proved too much for the stomachs of two of the three men.

Leaving their vomit behind with the victim’s blood, they fetched him out of the alley without ever glancing at their burden. A burly man in uniform had turned up in the tavern since their departure. In the name of the City Watch, he commandeered the torn old cloak that had long hung on the back wall. No one should have to look at the ghastliness that had been perpetrated on the slim young man who had sought only to relieve his bladder.

Next day Lone met Chance in a venue that some would have considered unlikely for such men: Chiluna’s Green Acre. The place was far from large as an acre, and the only thing green there was the tea. Over a cup apiece, the younger orphan was excited yet carefully quiet in telling the older about how he had found the body of the second murder victim. That did not interfere with their noticing the entrance of two strangers. A brief inquiry led them to the table of the two suspicious-looking patrons, who were instantly wary.

The male newcomer was of average height and burly, with dark brown hair and a small beard of lighter brown and ginger. His tunic was off-white with hem stripes in blue, over darkish blue leggings and a handsome pair of buskins, dark brown and worn. His mantle was short, medium brown, and thrown back. He wore both sword and dagger—but of course everyone bore a dagger, the world’s all-purpose tool. In cut and style, his hair was …just there. This carefully conservative man, the oldest person present, wanted to be one who faded into any background.

He was neither hurried nor reluctant in showing Chance and Lone the medallion that proclaimed him a representative of the government

“My name is Taran Sayn,” he said crisply. His manner was friendly. “I represent the Sharda. We are investigators in the employ of Judge Nevermind, who is interested in increased citizen safety.”

Lone cocked his head to one side. “Judge Nevermind?”

The bland-looking man shrugged. “It’s just that he is a magistrate, Lone, a member of government. You need to know my name and that I’m with the Sharda, not his name.”

“As you knew mine, already. But—aren’t you Ilsigi?” .

“Native Sanctuarian, yes,” Sayn said, without taking his gaze off Lone’s eyes. “Not all of us in government are Irrune.”

Lone’s head, which had realigned itself, went into cocked mode again. “And you work for an Ilsigi judge?”

“Let’s just say that he is a man who believes that we native Sanctuarians have a right to police and judge ourselves. Never forget that most of the nabobs are of Ilsigi descent. This judge’s goals are in our interest.”

“So,” Lone began slowly after a long moment of reflection, “is knowing the name of such a man.”

Sayn gazed meditatively at him for about the length of time Lone had taken to process the previous information. Then he said, “His name is Elisar.”

“Judge Elisar,”

“Right. Now. I am with the Sharda, as I said, and the reason I am here is to ask you questions, Lone, and instead all I have done is answer yours.”

“Uh-huh,” Lone said, and gestured at the painfully thin young woman standing just aft and to port of the Sharda man. “And who is she?”

Sayn showed his unhappiness at being plied with still another question, but without turning to his companion he said, “This is my associate. Her name is Ixma.”

Chance took a turn at speaking. “S’danzo blood in you, Ixma?”

Hair the color of a moonless night shone as the tawny wraith of a woman nodded.

Sayn asked, “And who are you, sir?”

“Name’s Chance,” he said, and leaned back as if to remove himself from the gathering. “Lone and I happened to meet here a few minutes ago.”

“Good for you. Lone: Do you think it’s possible that I might get to do my job and ask you a few questions some time before sunset?”

Lone smiled slightly in accompaniment to a solemn nod. “Ask, Taran Sayn.”

But now the man of sixty-eight years, longtime foe of authority figures, decided to be contrary. “I think first you should tell us what that odd word ‘sharda’ means.”

By now Lone was impatient to get this incident over with and this pair of law-enforcers out of the neighborhood. “It means some police-types who investigate for Judge Nevermind,” he said. “Also known as Elisar.”

“Accompanied by a-sensitive,” Chance added.

Taran Sayn’s face showed his reluctance to be amused, just before he laughed. “True. Ixma?”

“A sharda,” she said, in a markedly subdued voice that seemed to match her short stature and almost frightening leanness, “is a hound, a hunting dog of the Irrune. A sharda is said never, never to give up the scent.”

Lone said, “Are you never going to ask me whatever it is you are going to ask, hunting hound?”

“Yes. Might I sit down?”

Meeting his eyes directly, Lone shrugged.

“Two more cups here,” Chance called.

“That’s all right,” Sayn said. “We won’t be here long and don’t require anything.”

Chance gave him a glare. “Spend some money, government man.”

Lone was surprised when Chance rose and, leaning on the back of his chair, drew out one of the others for Ixma.

“I never knew my father or mother,” he said quietly while she, showing surprise, slid gracefully into the chair, “and she barely knew my father. The nearest to a mother I ever had was a S’danzo, a superb seer named Moonflower. One of the fish-eyes murdered her. I saw to her vengeance. In case you ever wondered, their blood is red.” He did not see fit to mention Moonflower’s daughter, who had once meant so much to the boy he had been, this man whose boyhood had persisted for so long.

During his utterance Sayn began his questions, nodding at each of Lone’s replies. Yes, Lone had discovered the body of the murdered youth last evening. No, to his knowledge he had never seen the victim before. He had been identified as Ticky by some others in the tavern. They said he left alone and no one had noticed anyone leave soon after.

No, Lone had no idea who might have found him even earlier, and no, he had no idea who might have done such a horrendous deed—the same sort of unnecessarily gruesome deed on two successive nights, leaving behind the same sort of blood-soaked victim with his chest ripped open and his lungs missing. It went against the grain to volunteer information, but he did, describing what he had heard and the inhuman thing that had bowled him over.

Sayn showed interest in the fact that Lone thought it was female, and persisted with several more queries. Lone and Chance both caught the fact that twice the Sharda man shifted his gaze, very briefly, to Ixma. Apparently she gave no sign that she knew other than Lone’s replies, for after a time Sayn bobbed his head and rose to his feet.

Before he could depart, Lone snatched the opportunity to ask Sayn about the phrase “Native Sanctuarian.”

“No, it isn’t necessary,” he was told, and both Sayn’s expression and voice were serious and perhaps even portentous. “But I do prefer the phrase to ‘Wrigglie’ … even though a lot of our people have taken over that old Rankan insult as a sort of code”

Chance’s brows came down. With incredulity and some anger he demanded, “You mean some Ilsigi are actually referring to each other by that insulting word?”

“Yes, but not because some of our ancestors wriggled under the heel of Ranke. They apply the term to themselves as a means of establishing that we are of Sanctuary, Sanctuarians, a separate people entirely apart from Ilsig City and not subject to its king. But any of us who use the term still object to its use by others.”

The old man chuckled. “So I’m a Wrigglie, and you’re a Wrigglie, and it’s fine for us to say so, but if a Rankan or an Irrune says it we mess up his face?”

For the first time Sayn showed emotion: He laughed. A little, and briefly. “Exactly! What do you do, Chance of the Ilsigi?”

“I’m retired,” Chance said, and the way he declaimed it made the lawman decide instantly that he might as well not ask the next question.

Instead he said, “Lone: Thank you. If you think of anything that might help me uncover the monster who did so much more than mere murder on those two boys, please tell Gorbat in the farmers’ market, under the sign of the blue-and-white awning.”

“I can think of five awnings like that,” Lone said, although he had no intention of having more dealings with a representative of law enforcement or indeed anything or anyone having to do with government. “What does he sell?”

“Vegetables from his own garden and a marvelous bread he makes with flaxseed, marjoram, and something he won’t reveal.”

Lone and his chosen mentor watched the two Sharda amble as if casually across the room, and depart

“Well,” Lone said, “we got our tea paid for, at least. Notice that he did not so much as touch his?”

“Aye—and, I’ll bet,” Chance said, “they know we were telling the truth. At least I believe that’s the purpose of the part-S’danzo.”

“You think that’s the form her Seeing takes? To know whether people are telling the truth?” Lone looked down to see that the hair on his arm had taken a notion to stand up.

“More importantly,” Chance said, “whether people are lying. I hope that’s as far as her talent goes, watered down by non-S’danzo blood. Otherwise by now she may well be telling him more about us.”

“More than we want policers to know!”

Chance only nodded. He was trying hard to be a proper mentor, and was sure that part of being mature meant being sparing with words. He did make a remark abut how conservative that Sayn fellow was. Lone cocked his head.

“I believe we could ask everyone here what he was wearing and hear at least five different descriptions,” Chance explicated. “What does that tell you, roof-hopper?”

“Ahhh … people don’t notice what they say? Or don’t remember?”

“Including you, apprentice who chose me as mentor. Sayn’s clothing and hair tell me that he does not wish to be noticed more than necessary. And that is a better than good idea.” He paused for a moment of reflection. “And now an admission, Lone. I always had a real need to stand out, to be sure everybody noticed me. It is much in your favor that you do not have such a need.”

“Thank you, Master!” Lone said with unfeigned exuberance, and tried to be surreptitious about examining himself, and what he was wearing …

This person told that one about Lone’s quest, and she told a couple of others, and one of them told fifteen or sixteen others, and some of them spoke to others, and by noon Lone was practically running toward the orange-and-brown-striped roof under which sizzled hot flatbread and savories. Behind the counter was a fellow with an unfortunate nose unaided by his hangdog mustache. Ah yes, the young woman his anxious accoster sought had just made a purchase and departed. The man pointed. Lone’s heart leaped as he turned to see the retreating female back below a good deal of lustrous auburn hair. He did not need the glimpse of the ornate gold bracelet to know it was Janithe, despite the fact that she looked fuller of figure than he remembered.

“I owe you,” Lone gusted, “but right now I have no time to buy!”

“Later then,” the cook-vendor said. “And good luck with that girl.”

The elated Lone angered a few people by the callowly careless way he made his way through the multitude, but no one tried to make more of it than an angry yelp or shout. In mere seconds he fell into place beside the girl or woman he had so heroically saved from a fate worse than.

“G’day to you, Janithe of Caronne. Why did you leave me in such a hurry?”

“Good day to you, Lone,” she said, turning her face a little his way while still walking. It seemed incredible that she had filled out a bit, in just two days, and was less pale. “I will admit to being fearful and very shaky after you rescued me—and embarrassed, too, for I was in great need of relieving myself.”

He gazed ahead as he walked. “You have stopped being fearful of me?”

“I asked about you. You seem well known to the merchants here, and none showed anything even close to fear when they spoke of you.”

“Glad to hear it. That rumble you may have heard was my stomach. What are you eating?”

“Beans and rice with onion,” Janithe said, waving the fat roll of flatbread and turning his way again as they walked. “Would you like a bite?”

“I would rather have a whole one of my own,” he told her. “Are you in a hurry to be somewhere?”

“No” she told him, and they went smiling back to the orange-and-brown vending station.

“I’ve not stopped here often,” Lone told the man with the nose too long and too thin and with a hook besides. “What is your name?”

“Scaff will do. Just Scaff.”

“You ought to have a sign, Scaff,” Lone said while he waited for his rolled-up lunch. “I’m Lone and this is Janithe.”

Scaff did not look up from his cooking. “People charge money to paint good signs, Lone.”

“Sorry,” Lone said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“That’s my mother’s recipe for scaff,” he told her. “Yes, I’m from Mrsevada and my name is a long one so I’m called after the bread I make—scaff. Here you are, Lone.”

Lone paid and the couple walked away, neither with a destination now and both apparently oblivious to everything except each other.

Long view, Lone and Janithe walking hand in hand down a colorful street, chatting and laughing merrily;

Long view, moving steadily in on Lone and Janithe happily picnicking on a grassy sward;

Long midafternoon view, Lone and Janithe happily walking along the beach, hand in hand; then running while giggling happily, her hair streaming behind her like a cloak;

Late afternoon glimpse of Lone and Janithe happily riding in a one-horse carriage, obviously more taken with each other than the scenery they pass;

Sunset scene: Lone and Janithe embracing; kissing …

And fade out.

Anyone might have expected a couple so clearly involved with each other not to part at day’s end, but to spend the night together. That was not the case. Lone despised the fact that he had a prior engagement, but it was, after all, with his mentor and that man’s best friend, at the home of the latter: Strick. Gratifying was the fact that Janithe seemed just as fascinated with him as he was with her, and agreed to meet him at the second hour tomorrow at Scaff’s food stand. With little time to spare before he knew Strick’s “housekeeper” would have dinner prepared, Lone reluctantly parted her company. He had to rush to the better section of town where Strick dwelled. He had ceased taking a little gift on these more than welcome occasions, for both Spellmaster and Linnana knew where and how he came by them …

None of the three in Strick’s home could fail to notice how the quiet and often close to surly Lone glowed. He had already told Chance about Janithe, and now was pleased to tell him and the others that he had found her. Strick asked about the unusual bracelet Lone mentioned, and he drew the white mage a picture. Clearly, both the seriously fat mage and Linnana found it interesting, but gave no indication that they had ever seen it or one like it. Hours later, as Lone was leaving, she asked him to make an exact drawing of the design on the ornament.

Lone agreed, and departed, and went home and to bed but lay awake thinking of Janithe, and was sorry that he had not made late-night plans that involved his profession. He was early in reaching the market next morning, where he learned that the thing had claimed another victim, another large young male within the same area as the others: one within the Maze, two nearby. This one too had been savagely and nigh impossibly ripped and torn, and bereft of his lungs. It did seem, after that third consecutive night yielded gory horror, that everyone in the city knew about the assaults and was talking about them, and everyone had an opinion, a theory, a “What if” …

That day and the next, on mornings without word of new victims, the darling couple that included the winsome foreign girl with the golden skin and the formerly sinister-looking orphan lad with all the weapons entered the market early and together, and bought their breakfast from the man nicknamed for his bread. On the third morning Scaff arrived in the market to discover that someone had been skulking about his place of business the night previous, but without criminal intent. Instead, a huge sign had been professionally inked on heavy sailcloth and clandestinely installed:

SCAFF!

GOOD SAVORY FOOD WITH THE BEST BREAD IN TOWN!

That was also the day when Janithe moved in with Lone. Yes, she knew what he did for a living. She was surprised to discover that he had been a virgin until now, but did not reveal that she recognized the fact. Already market regulars had noticed the loving couple and were talking, smiling. A day later, the day when no new corpse was reported and when Janithe appeared wearing a handsome necklace of carved cabochons of amber, Lone asked Scaff if business had improved since yesterday’s addition of the sign.

Scaff turned slowly to stare at the dark youth, and was surprised to see that he and his chosen woman were wearing matching new tunics in snowy white with yellow borders on sleeves and hem. Scaff cocked his head.

“Of course business is up. Lone? Did—did you make this sign?”

Lone’s smile or response slid into a chuckle. He thrust a clean but nail-bitten finger at the center of his chest. “Me? Me, Scaff? I’m no artist, and clearly an artist made your sign! No no oh no, I did not make this handsome sign!”

Scaff looked dubious, but after a while he shrugged and addressed himself to his little stove. “Well, if you ever find the person who did, tell him he will always have a meal here but will never be allowed to pay for it Meanwhile, you and Janny are such reg’lars I think I’ll just give you breakfast today!”

And in private Janithe, whose tunic and necklace had not been stolen but which Lone had bought in the market, wondered aloud to her lover how it was that a man who “earned” a living by stealing from others could be so generous. Lone’s reply was to lower his head, then turn away, and mutter defensively that it made him feel good.

When they visited his wealthy friend Strick and the S‘danzo woman he and she pretended was his housekeeper and who was actually his woman, it was soon clear that Strick and Linnana and Chance liked “Lone’s golden girl” and that she was more than welcome. Quietly in the kitchen the S’danzo seer told Janithe what she knew of the ghastly childhood that Lone avoided talking about. Both she and the stricken Janithe allowed as how they could understand that the result of such horror in childhood could grow up to be a monster who hated everyone—or a person unable to resist a desire or maybe a need to give, to do things for others in need—and some who were not

That night Linnana and the obese Spellmaster examined Janithe’s long, ornate bracer. The design, they decided amid their muttering, appeared to be oceanically based. They learned that the work of art, almost the length of Janithe’s forearm, was seamless and that she could not take it off. She also could not or would not tell them how it came to be on her arm. No, it did not hurt and no, she did not wish Strick to use his powers to try to discover its origin, or to remove it. He merely nodded. The thing and its presence were sorcerous, of course, but what could the white mage do but accept her wishes?

Sharp-eyed even at his age, Chance noted. the odd little slit-like birthmarks just behind/under Janithe’s ears. He said nothing about it until she and Lone had left. Strick and Linnana had not noticed, and did no speculating.

The subject of the three mutilation murders did not come up that night, and gradually conversation and speculation on that subject petered out among the general populace of Sanctuary.

On the eighth day after the new moon Lone was happy to move himself and his beloved into new and larger accommodations. By that time it had become necessary for Scaff to hire an assistant, and the business of the seamstress Saylulah was up, too. She knew very well the cause was that Lone and Janithe kept blabbering about Saylulah and her expertise, and soon the charming couple had others talking about her as well. She and others talked about the charming couple, too. People looked their way, smiling. People watched them, and nudged each other, and rolled their eyes, and exchanged winks. Such an attractive couple! So obviously enraptured with each other. No one ever saw them apart anymore. Janithe even accompanied Lone to his lessons in swordwork, and presumably watched, or perhaps merely waited.

The only time Janithe was not present was when Lone in the persona of Catwalker dealt with the husband of the granddaughter of Shive the Changer, a man who exchanged foreign money in quantity for local, and who bought this and that object without asking questions. Business was business.

As usual Strick and Linnana celebrated the full moon by inviting Lone and Chance, and this time they had no thought of trying to find a girl for him. No one need say aloud that the time of the full moon was not good for such night work as practiced by Chance and his apprentice. Linnana, especially, noted that the girl with the fascinating skin seemed paler and thinner than she had a matter of mere days ago. By now she had new earrings, a bracelet, and a luxurious dress too nice for any occasion in her life.

On the twenty-first day they had an argument over nothing in particular and spent most of a day and all night making up and trying to atone to each other.

On the first night of moondark, however, Lone left his woman in their new home while he saw to business, and next morning, for the first time in thirty days and nights, another young man had been lured or surprised in a narrow alley and hideously clawed and bitten, and his lungs ripped out—to be consumed?

Again Sanctuary exploded with horror, anger, fear, and endless exchange of opinions and speculations.

After a month, “everybody knew”—that is, many many regulars in the market—that daily the darling couple bought breakfast or lunch from Scaff. That partially explained the fact that the same pair of Sharda investigator appeared there to, as they told Scaff and others, talk to Lone. They knew he had been out last night, and wanted to know where he had been and what he had done. Sayn and Ixma waited a long time before at last deciding they had been idle long enough, and went away.

Lone and Janithe did not show up until over an hour later, for some reason both lovers had slept both deeply and late.

“I saw the inhuman thing that killed those fellows last month,” Lone said, frowning, “and I’m the one found the body, and I told people, and the Sharda man came to question me. Now it has happened again, and however he found out I was not home last night, he did. Naturally he suspects me … and Scaff, I didn’t kill anybody—but I can’t tell him where I was last night, either.”

Scaff understood. “In that case, Lone, Janny—do not turn around. Just walk around my booth and get yourself out of here, fast. A man of the City Watch is heading this way with his hand on his pommel, and it ain’t me he’s got his eye on.”

“Go left,” Lone muttered, and Janithe did while he went rightward, and around Scaff’s place of business and across a thronged aisle and between two other vendors and cut left and on a ways farther and then left and between two other stalls, and left, and through the crowd, and out of the market. Only then did he unexcitedly say, “Run,” and they did.

“Master,” a frowning Komodoflorensal said, “look here. That ornate bracer I learned of … it has to do with the daughter of the ancient beast-god of the sea.”

His master turned on the apprentice a frown of his own, almost a murderous one. “Are you speaking of Ka’thulu?”

“Aye, Uncle ‘Lonikas! Ka’thulu!”

“Nonsense, idiot! Let me see your alleged work, fool. That fancy bauble could not possibly be—name of Consternatis! A miracle! For once you are right!”

“I’m glad my man found you,” a grim-faced Strick told Chance, the moment that man and his cane tap-tapped their way into his office-cum-spelling chamber.

A bit red of face and panting from the effort of hurrying in response to the urgent summons of his friend, Chance sank down in the chair across the long, blue-draped table that was the white mage’s desk. He was surprised to find Linnana also present

“Rushing across town is not so easy as it once was,” he gasped, and accepted the towel Linnana proffered. He wiped his face and set his hand to his chest, a bit left of center. There was that irregular pounding again, damn it. “What is so urgent?”

“We have work to do,” Strick said, with no lessening of the deadly seriousness of his face or manner. “Lone has to be warned, and more. That long bracer on Janithe’s arm is one the beast-god Ka’thulu gave to his daughter when he proclaimed her the sklamera, chief among the demons of his domain—the sea.”

“Ah gods,” Strick said, seeming to grow smaller in his chair. “You talk of sorcery! Ach, Ils our Father knows how I hate sorcery!”

Strick only nodded, having heard nothing he had not heard before from this man. “The sklamera never took it off—including in the several hundredth year of her life when she lay with a mortal youth and deceived her father by secretly equipping the lad with gills and becoming his wife. Love, supposedly, true love. The sea-god was outraged and bent on dastardly vengeance, but his daughter persuaded him to forbear. Years passed, and more years, but they were only moments to the beast-god and the demoness. Of course she did not age, while her husband did, and that made him increasingly unhappy. He dealt with his realization of mortality by betraying her, and with a mere mortal woman. Ka’thulu proved so vengeful and so evil as to do horrible death on the human. He made the sklamera watch his agony as he died, far beneath the waves.”

Chance nodded dully. “He sealed the gills she had given the man …”

“Exactly. And then the king-beast of the sea turned on his own daughter, as if she had not been punished enough for having shown a preference for an air-dweller. The spell he cast on her is a particularly nasty one. Without lungs and with her gills sealed, the sklamera can exist only one way—she is forever condemned to imprisonment within the bracer.”

“Ah, gods, Strick! Please don’t tell me that this sklamera is … that it somehow possesses Lone’s beloved!”

Linnana turned her unhappy face away. Strick nodded. “You saw the mark of the sea-demon on Janithe—the rudimentary gills in her neck. Linnana knows the lore better than I do. Linnana?”

She spoke quietly and seemingly without emotion. “An ancient legend among the Beysib is known too to the S’danzo. Throughout the ages a succession of comely young women has been so unfortunate as to draw the attention of the unhappiest of all females, a demon who exists only by inhabiting a bauble of gold. Their name for her is scilarna. This demon bonds herself to the surrogate, and when a moonless sky renders the sea equally black, she is reminded of a long-ago unfaithful love. She takes revenge on the deceitful male sex by choosing a comely young man each night of the moon-dark, and by ripping out of him that which makes him human, and mortal—”

“His lungs,” Chance murmured, staring down at nothing and remembering a long-lost love.

“I need not tell you this is the time of the new moon,” Strick said. “A fresh victim was found this morning. No matter how painful for us and Lone, he has to be warned.”

“There’s more,” Linnana said. “The Watch want him.”

The three exchanged looks of anguish and alarm, and began to plan.

Taran Sayn and the helmeted, cuirassed man of the Watch who accompanied him reached the apartment recently rented to Lone and Janithe, and knocked, and knocked again, and called out. Then Sayn shouted, and the policer leaned spear and shield against the wall and used his fist to pound the door, and shouted, and suddenly Sayn did a silly thing: He reached out and tried the handle.

The door began to swing open.

“If the occupation of this Lone fellow really is what we more than suspect,” Sayn said while the door swung slowly inward, “it’s hard to imagine that he fails to lock up when he leaves his own home! Well, inside, Taganall, and let’s see what we see.”

It hardly seemed necessary for Taganall to draw sword before he entered the darkened apartment, but he did and his companion made no comment. Their search was cursory, since all they sought was a man. They found no one, and no signs of struggle either.

Two blocks away, however, in the direction of that area of town where the four lungless victims had been found, they found a cohort of Taganall’s. The uniformed man’s left arm was still through the first strap of his shield, and his hand still clutched the second, but his sword was fast in its sheath and his spear lay on the pave. Beside it was his body, which had been gorily ripped apart by talons backed by fearsome strength.

“Odd,” Sayn said, ignoring the suddenly bloodless face of his uniformed companion. “His chest hasn’t been torn open. That means he still has his lungs. That tells me he was not tonight’s intended victim, Taganall. He must merely have run afoul of the thing in pursuit of his normal duties.”

“Not normal,” Taganall gasped. “Not normal. Every man in the Watch is on the streets tonight. We’re all going to be exhausted—tomorrow is likely to be remembered as Crime Day!”

He said it accusingly, as if he held the investigator responsible. But Sayn did not respond, for he was a man not without compassion, and Taganall was busy vomiting.

One person awoke to a foreign presence in his apartment on that night without a moon, and another was not asleep, and the cat-burglar called Catwalker was forced to do some running. Up the facade of a building a floor and a half he forced himself as fast as he was able, every second in peril, and all in silence recklessly raced across that roof unlit even by the few visible stars on this night of sky-prowling clouds. His cloth loot-bag hung silently in one hand because it was padded with cotton fluff against the rattle and clink of precious metals and almost by instinct he launched his black-clad self into blackest night to alight on another roof, to smack into an unyielding slab of brick-hard blacker than blackness, and actually bounce off that chimney to fall and roll on the almost flat roof, grunting and gasping but holding back any outcry or curse.

And then he was forced to squint down into pitch blackness and pat the roof with both hands in quest of the bag containing tonight’s gleanings, and was on his feet and running again—dodging a second chimney—and again leaping, flying, soaring through moonless darkness under the faint illumination of a few lonesome stars. At last he fastened the bag to his belt, and double-checked the fastening, and began his downward clamber into the narrow space between this building and the next, which was taller.

He had descended past three rows of windows when he froze at the sudden eruption of clamor immediately below: a male shriek, followed by others as well as howls of pain in the same voice, all accompanied by a ferocious bestial snarling. The perilous “route” Catwalker followed down the side of the building was not one that enabled him to go back up. He stayed frozen, clinging to masonry.

Frozen except for his quivering, clinging desperately to masonry, Lone knew what he was hearing, and he did not want to go down. He listened to ripping sounds. And wet sounds. And then a stomach-lurching wet-ripping noise.

He remained hanging there until his fingers gave out, and spasmed, and he fell backward. By that time below him was only silence.

And hard-packed earth, and garbage.

Fortunately, his fall was for the most part broken by the motionless legs of the latest victim of the sklamera.

This time the superb cat-burglar called Catwalker did not try to examine the corpse. He did not even pause, but rolled off the poor fellow’s legs, grunted with pain as he lurched to his feet, and headed for the faint light he saw. He did not walk.

That rapid pace swiftly brought him out of the passageway between two buildings, and into the light of a torch set atilt in a cresset thrusting out from the building on the corner. His heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest as he glanced in each direction, decided, and started moving rapidly up Tranquility Street. He was at the next corner and in the act of crossing there when the blood-splashed and smeared thing of nightmares seemed just to appear before him, at a distance of some two bodylengths. It snarled in a low voice. It was definitely humanshaped and definitely female, with long stringy hair like seaweed trailing over its shoulders and chest. With feet well apart and arms bent with horribly long claws poised, it stared.

I am dead, Lone thought, filling one hand with nearly three feet of steel and the other with a six-pointed star. He dared not turn his back on this horror to run. He had no choice but to match its stare.

“Lone!” a voice called from behind him, and he jerked spastically at the unexpected sound. “Move aside! You’re between us and it!”

Lone was very aware of that fact, but chose not to say so. It was all he could do not to glance behind him. He thought he recognized the voice, but was not sure. He stared into the eyes of the beast, which was no longer snarling but still drooling blood. Now it cocked its hideous head, and the eyes that stared into his seemed to soften.

Impossible, Lone thought, the hand that held the throwing star slowly rising toward his right ear.

He jerked again in startlement when a spear appeared to the left of his waist, its murderously big head aimed at the beast and carried low for impaling. The smooth round pole was thicker than the thumb of a fat banker and tipped with a full foot of pointed, interestingly recurved steel thick as the wrist of a child. Lone recognized the shape and the markings and was even aware of irony; the thief’s would-be rescuer was a member of the Watch! The spear was moving slowly past him as its wielder advanced, not yet within peripheral vision.

Suddenly the monster uttered a howl beyond fearsome, and charged.

Lone did not have time even to take a swift sideward step, but his arm flashed forward and down. The star of death whizzed on its way, humming—and skipped ringingly along the cobbled street far beyond the spot where the target had been. The sklamera, however, proved not to be charging Lone, but instead to his left. In a seemingly deliberate act of decision, it impaled itself on the leveled spear.

“Uh!” its wielder grunted with impact and effort, while the self-spitted thing of nightmares screamed and writhed and gnashed teeth more horrible than most humans ever saw.

The policer held steady, and twisted his arms and thus the spear, while the sea-beast howled and writhed bloodily on it. And then the hands of the man accompanying the policer enwrapped the far end of the shaft, and savagely rammed it. A freshet of blood burst from the sklamera’s back, swiftly followed by inches of pointed steel. Lone swung his sword high, and back.

“Lone!” a shout rose. “Don’t!”

Recognizing the voice of Linnana, he arrested his motion and turned his head from the dread scene of an impaled monster. He was surprised to see, behind the policer and Taran Sayn, a horse and the little carriage it pulled. Of course; Strick’s home was many blocks from here and he was too fat to walk either fast or far. Four of them had come in quest of Catwalker. the driver Samoff, and Strick, and Linnana, and Chance. Wearing a look of concern deeper than Lone had seen on that face, the master thief was hurrying toward his apprentice.

“Put up the sword, Lone, please!”

Lone glanced at the thing writhing and surely dying on the thick shaft of hardwood that completely transpierced its lower torso, and knew that he could deal the deathstroke. But without a word he sheathed his sword.

There on the street called Tranquility in Sanctuary, Chance stood with a hand on Lone’s shoulder while they watched the beast-daughter of the god Ka’thulu die—again.

“We could not let you cut her, Lone,” Chance said quietly. “You did not slay her and neither did that policer.”

“It—just hurled itself right onto my spear!” a sweaty, red-faced Taganall gasped in wonder.

“It did exactly that, and I know why,” Linnana said, and came too to stand beside Lone and lay an affectionate hand as seven pairs of eyes gazed down at the spasmodically kicking but dead thing on the cobbles. “She just could not bring herself to harm Lone. Oh Lone, we’re all so sorry.”

Lone was just starting to frown in puzzlement when the dead thing began to change. Over the course of a long, long minute, the sklamera resumed the form of the human whose body and mind it had used. Before the change was complete the long golden bracelet became visible, and the very young man who loved her screamed his plaintive, “No-o-oh!”

That shrill cry of wretched youth echoed and re-echoed off buildings on either side of the stricken gathering of heroes, and raced up and down the length of the street called Tranquility.