6.

The pair of them went well enough where Hanse had figured they would go, in the alley behind the Unicorn. He held back as he had been doing and kept them in sight... wished anew that he had had the chance during the day to creep up to Ischade's lodgings and have a closer look, but she had been there most of the day, and daylight and the fact that it was the second storey gave him no easy options. When she had left, towards evening, he had been obliged to follow, having no real idea other motives and habitual movements ... and well that he had followed, since this evening had turned out as it had.

But there was still, as there had been, a presence on his trail -and that was Cappen. Hanse knew that much, had caught sight of the minstrel out of his own territory and seen him more than once on streets where Cappen had no business being.

And who had hired Cappen?

It was not Cappen's custom to take employment; he diced and he sang songs; but never this kind of work. He was not suited for ft. Enas Yorl could have hired better. Far better.

But this Ischade - Hanse refused the idea. And yet constantly nagging at him in that small nook of his mind where he tucked coincidences, was Cappen's presence that morning. But Cappen had been in the game too, like Mradhon Vis and Sjekso; and Cappen had get off with some profit, as Cappen usually did.

Cappen bought him a drink; and that was uncommon, that Cappen had that much to spare. But it was in Cappen's nature to play the lord and throw about what he had.

Cappen had ducked out of the Unicorn a scant moment before the blind man came, having a.s.sured Hanse's presence there with that drink... but that then circled the matter back to Yorl, where it made least sense.

Hanse forbore another glance over his shoulder, reckoning that even Cappen's unskilled stalking might pick that up. He kept his attention towards the pair in front of him, kept moving where necessary - watched them reach the steps and both of them start up the stairs towards the lady's lodgings, without any exchanged movement which might mean the pa.s.sing of the loot.

Now ... now while the noise of the creaking stairs gave him sound to rely on in tracking them - he had his chance, and took it, a path he had marked out that afternoon. He carefully set his hands on a barrel, levered himself up into a tuck and sought the next level of debris, noiselessly, one after the other, holding his breath as one foothold rocked and the next proved stable.

He made the roof as the pair made the door and opened it; he edged along it with the greatest care - a wooden roof at least, and not the tiles some fancied uptown. Even now he would have preferred to be rid of the boots and to go barefoot, as he had worked in the days before prosperity, but he figured there was no time for such. He edged his way around the ell of the roof on wet shingles and out on to that section over the room itself.

There was noise inside, a sharp, animal sound which lifted his nape hairs and made him less certain he wanted near this place at all. He edged closer to the very edge of the eaves, put his head over, viewing upside down where only parchment covered the window and formed a scant barrier to sounds and voices from inside. He heard footsteps clearly, heard a napping sound... and suddenly a jolt and crack as an aged shingle snapped in two under his hand on the edge. It flung him overbalance, but he caught himself on his belly, spread-eagled on the roof. 'Hssst!' he heard from inside, and he swore silently by appropriate G.o.ds and began to work his way hastily back from the vulnerable edge.

His hands, his legs went numb; his breath grew short and the talisman at his throat became a lump of ice and fire. Magic, he thought, some warding spell flung his way ... he dealt with wizards; and it was a trap. He strove to make his limbs do what they well knew how to do: carefully he put a knee on a wet and worn row of shingles on the slant.

One broke; he slipped, a rattling loud career down the layered face of the shingles, his feet swinging into empty air, his wild final thought that if he fought the fall now he might go head downwards or on to his back. He let go, slid, expecting a dizzying long drop -the barrels, maybe, the debris of the alley might break his fall and save his back and legs - He hit the edge of the porch unprepared, a shock that sent him tumbling a further few feet down the stairs backwards - a ridiculous lot of noise, his battered mind was thinking through the pain, an embarra.s.sing lot of noise...

And then the door was open above him, and he was lying sprawled on his back head downwards on the narrow steps, looking up through his feet at Mradhon Vis, who came with the metal flash of a dagger in his fist.

Hanse went for the belt knife, curled up and threw it with all he had: Mradhon Vis staggered back with an oath, spun half about by the cast as Hanse twisted to get up, his feet higher than his head with a railing on his left and a wall on his right, which hindered more than helped. He got as far as his knee when the bravo's foot caught him under the jaw and hurled him back into the wall; and a knife followed - further humiliation - up against his throat while Mradhon Vis grabbed his hair and twisted. Hanse fought to get loose; he thought that he struggled, but the messages were slow getting to his limbs, and the burning of the amulet at his throat distracted him with the feeling that he was choking or was it the knife?

'Bring him up,' a female voice said from the light of the doorway; and Hanse looked blurrily up into it, while a hand twisted into his hair jerked him up and the dagger shifted a keen point to his back under the ribs. He went up the stairs, and followed the blackrobed figure which retreated inside. There seemed little else at the moment that he could do, that he wanted to do, bruised as he was and with his wits leaden weighted. He blinked in the interior light, stared dully at the russet silks, at the clutter of objects separately beautiful, but which lay disarrayed - like bones in a nest, he thought distantly, thinking of something predatory; and he jerked at the sudden racket and nutter of wings, a fluttering of the lamplight in the commotion of a great black bird which sat on its perch over against the wall.

'You can go,' the woman said, and Hanse's heart lifted for the instant. 'You've been paid. Come back tomorrow.' And then he knew she spoke to Mradhon Vis.

'Tomorrow.'

'Then.'

'Is that all there is? And leave this here?' A jab at Hanse's back. 'I took a knife, woman; I've got a hole in my arm and you keep this and turn me out in the wet, do you?'

'Out,' she said, in a lower tone.

And to Hanse's bewilderment the knife retreated. Hanse moved then, turned in the instant, thinking of a quick stab from behind, his own hand to his wrist sheath ... and he had the blade out, facing Mradhon Vis - but somehow the rest of the move failed him, and he watched dully as Mradhon Vis turned away and sulked his way to the open door.

'Close it behind you,' the woman said, and Mradhon Vis did so, not slamming it.

Hanse blinked, and the amulet at his neck hurt more than any bruise he had taken. It burned, and he had no sense left to get rid of it.

Ischade smiled abstractedly at her guest, left him so a moment, having greater business at hand. 'Peruz,' she said softly, shook back her hood, and taking from her robes the necklace, she drew near the huge raptor ... or the guise it wore.

With the greatest of care she slipped the necklace into a small case which hung from the side of the stand and fastened the case in its turn to the scaly leg of the bird. Peruz stood still too, uncommonly so, his great wings folded. A last time she teased the breast feathers, the softness about the neck - she had grown fond of the creature in recent weeks, as anything that shared her life. She smiled at the regard of a cold topaz eye.

'Open the window,' she instructed her intruder/guest, and he moved, slowly, with the look of a man caught in a bad dream. 'Open it,' and he did so. She launched Peruz and he flew, with a clap of wings, a hurtling out towards the dark, a lingering coolness of wind.

So he was sped. Her employer had all he had paid to have - and well paid. And she was alone. She let go her mental grip on the ruffian ... and at once his face showed panic and he whipped up the knife he had in hand. She stopped that.

He looked confused, as if he had quite forgotten what the dagger was doing in his hand. And that effort would cost her, come the morning: on the morrow would be a fearful headache and a mortal la.s.situde, so that she would want to do nothing for days but drowse. But now the blood was still quick in her veins, the excitement lingered, and in the threat of ennui and solitude which followed any completed task ... she felt another kind of excitement, and looked on her uninvited visitor knowing, quite knowing that at such times she was mad, and what it cost to cure such madness for the time...

Attractive. Her tastes were broad, but in that curiously com-partmented mind of hers, it pleased her ... the mission done ... that there was room for Mradhon to go. Here stood instead an unmissable someone - he had all the marks of that condition. It was justice owed her for her pains ... twice as sweet when it all came together just as it did now, her satisfaction and the last untidy threads of a business, tied together and nipped short.

She held out her hand and came closer, feeling that sweet/sad warmth that s.e.x set into her blood ... and had felt it, at every weakening moment, from the time she had robbed the wrong wizard and left him living. In the morning she would even feel some torment for it, a tangled regret: the handsome ones always left her with that, a sense of beauty wasted. But for the moment reason was quite gone.

And there had been so many before.

Hanse still held the knife and could not feel it; then heard the distant shock it made hitting the floor. There was no pain of the bruises, no sensation but of warmth and of the woman's nearness, her dark eyes regarding him, her perfume enveloping him. And the amulet at his throat, which gave off a bitter cold: that was the one last focus of his discomfort. She put her arms about his neck and her fingers found the chain. 'You don't want this,' she said, lifting it ever so gently over his head. He heard it fall, far, far away. Truth, he did not want it. He wanted her. It came to him that this was the way that Sjekso had gone, before he had ended up dead and cold outside the Unicorn, and it failed to matter. Her lips pressed his and oh, G.o.ds, he wanted her.

The floor wavered, and a wind swept in, laden with sweetish incense...

'Pardon me,' Enas Yorl said, and the couple on the verge of further intimacies broke apart, the woman staring at him wide-eyed and Shadowsp.a.w.n with a hazy desperation. The russet silks in the room still billowed with the draught he had set up.

'Who are you?' the woman Ischade asked, and at once Enas Yorl felt a small trial of his defences, which he shrugged off. Ischade's expression at once took on a certain wariness.

'Let him go,' Enas Yorl said with a back-handed wave towards Shadowsp.a.w.n. 'He's admirably discreet. And I'd take it kindly. - Go on, Shadowsp.a.w.n. Now. Quickly.'

Shadowsp.a.w.n edged towards the door, hesitated there, with a look of violated sanity.

'Out,' Enas Yorl said.

The thief spun about and opened the door, a fresh gust of wind.

And fled.

Hanse hit the stairs running, hardly pausing for the steps, never saw the figure loom up at the bottom until he was headed straight down at the knife that aimed at his gut.

He knocked the attacking blade aside and grabbed for arms or clothes, whatever he could hold, fell, in the shock of the collision, tumbled with the attacker and the blade, and lost his purchase in the impact with the ground. He hit on his back, desperately got a grip on the descending knife hand with Mradhon Vis's face coming down on him with a weight of body a third again his own. It was his left hand he used on the descending arm, left hand, knife hand, involved with that, and his battered muscles shook under the strain while he plied his unaccustomed right hand trying to reach the knife strapped to his leg. His left arm was buckling.

Suddenly Vis's weight shifted rightwards and came down on him, pinning his other arm - a limp weight, and in the s.p.a.ce Vis's grimace had occupied, most improbably, Cappen Varra stood with a barrel stave in both his hands.

'Did you want rescue?' Cappen asked civilly. 'Or is it all some new diversion?'

Hanse swore, kicked and writhed his way from under Vis's inert weight and went for his dagger in fright. Cappen checked his arm and the heat of anger went out of him, leaving only a sickly shiver. 'Hang you,' he said feebly, 'couldn't you have hit him easier and given me a go?'

And then he realized the source of the light which was streaming down on them by way of the stairs, and that above them was the open door in which two wizards met. 'G.o.ds,' he muttered, and scrambling up, grabbed Cappen by the arm.

And ran, for very life.

'Not my doing.'

'No?' Enas Yorl felt his shoulders expand ever so slightly, his features shift, and in his pride he refused to look down at his hands to know. Perhaps it was not too terrible, this form: Ischade's eyes flickered, but seemed unappalled.

'None of the killings that interest you,' she said, 'are mine. They're not my style. I trust I'm somewhat known in the craft. As you are, Enas Yorl.'

He gave a small bow. 'I have some unwilling distinction.'

'The story's known.'

'Ah.' Again he felt the shift, a wave of terror. He bent down and picked up the amulet which lay on the floor, saw his hand covered with a faint opalescence of scales. Then the scales faded and left only a young and shapely male hand. He tucked the amulet into his robes and straightened, looked at Ischade somewhat more calmly. 'So you're not the one. I don't ask you then who hired you. I can guess, knowing what you did - ah, I do know. And by morning the priests will have discovered the loss and made some subst.i.tution - the wars of G.o.ds, after all, follow politics, don't they? And what matter a riot or two in Sanctuary? It interests neither of us.'

'Then what is your interest?'

'How did they die, Ischade - your lovers? Do you know? Or don't you wonder?'

'Your curiosity - has it some specific grievance?'

'Ah, no grievance at all. I only ask.'

'I do nothing. The fault's their own ... their luck, a heart too fragile, a fall... who am I to know? They're well when they leave me, that's the truth.'

'But they're dead by morning, every one.'

She shrugged. 'You should understand. I have nothing to do with it.'

'Ah, indeed we have misfortunes in common. I know. And when I knew you'd come to Sanctuary -'

'It took me some few days to acclimate myself; I trust I didn't inconvenience you ... and that we'll avoid each other in future.'

'Ischade: how am I - presently?'

She tilted back her head and looked, blinked uncertainly. 'Younger,' she said.

'And quite handsome, really. Far unlike what I've heard.'

'So? Then you can look at me? I see that you can. And not many do.'

'I have business,' she declared, liking all of this less and less. She was not accustomed to feel fear ... hunted the sensation in the alleys of cities in the hope of discovering a measure of life. But this was far from comfortable. 'I have to be about.i.t.'

'What, some new employer?*

'Not killing wizards, if that's your worry. My business is private, and it need not intrude on yours.'

'And if I engaged you?'

'In what regard?'

'To spend one night with me.'

'You're mad.'

'I might become so - I don't age, you see. And that's the difficulty.'

'You're not afraid? You're looking to die? Is that the cause of all this?'

'Ah, I'm afraid at times. At times like this, when the shape is good. But it doesn't last. There are other times... and they come. And I never grow old, Ischade. I can't detect it if I do. And that frightens me.'

She regarded him askance ... he was handsome, very. She wondered if this had been his first shape, when he was young, that brought his trouble on him. It was a shape fine enough to have done that. The eyes were beautiful, full of pain. So many of her young men of the streets were full of that pain. It touched her as nothing else could.

'How long has it been,' he asked, setting his hands on her shoulders, touching ever so gently, 'since you had a lover worth the name? And how long since I've had hope of anything? We might be each other's answer, Ischade. If I should die, then that's one way out for me; or if I don't - then you're not doomed to lose them all, after all, are you, Ischade? Some of my forms might not be to your taste, but others -1 have infinite variety, Ischade. And no dread of you at all.'

'For this you hunted me down? That was it, wasn't it - the amulet, a way to draw yourself to me -'

'It costs you nothing. No harm. So small a thing for you, Ischade...'

It tempted. He was beautiful, this moment, this one moment, and the nights and the years were long.

And then the other chance occurred to her and she shivered, who had not shivered in years. 'No. No. Maybe you're set to die, but I'm not. No. Oppose two curses the like of ours - half the city could go in that shock, not to mention you and me. The chance of that, the merest chance - No. I'm not done living...'

He frowned, drew himself up with the least tremor about his lips, a look of panic. 'Ischade...' The voice began to change, and of a sudden the features starting with the mouth wavered, as if the strain had been too much, too long and dearly held. The scales were back; and 'No,' he cried, and plunged his face into hands which were not quite still hands. The draperies billowed, the very air rippled, and 'No...' the air sighed after him, a vanishing moan, a sob.

A second time she shivered, and looked about her, distracted, but he was quite gone.

So, well, she thought. He had had his answer, once for all. Her business took her here and there about the empire, but she discovered a liking for Sanctuary as for no other place she had known ... and it was well that Yorl took his answer, and that it was settled. New tasks might come. But at that moment she thought of the river house. This lodging was too well known for the time; and she might walk to the river... might meet someone - along the way.

The wine splashed into the cup and such was Hanse's state of mind that he never looked to see who served, only hoisted the cup and drank a mouthful.

'That's good,' he said; and Cappen Varra across the table in the Unicorn watched him shake off the ghosts and lifted his own cup, thinking ruefully of a song abandoned, a tale best not sung at all, even in the safe confines of the Unicorn. The city would be full of questions tomorrow, and it was well to know nothing at all... as he was sure Hanse planned to know least of all.

'A game,' Cappen proposed.

'No. No dicing tonight.' Hanse dug into his purse and came up with a silver round, laid it carefully on the table. 'That's for another pitcher when this is done. And for a roof tonight.'

Cappen poured again, topping off the cup - a wonder, that Hanse bought drinks.

Hanse flinging money about as if he wished to be rid of it.

'Tomorrow on the game,' Cappen said, in hope.

'Tomorrow,' Hanse said, and lifted the cup.

Blind Darous poured, the cup held just so for his finger to feel the cool of the liquid ... measured it carefully and extended the filled goblet towards his seated master. The breathing was hoa.r.s.e tonight. A hand took the stem of the cup most delicately, not touching his fingers at all, for which Darous was deeply grateful.

And towards the river, a house apart from others ... which seemed oddly discontinuous from its surrounds: in squalor, it had a garden, and a wall; and yet had a quaint decrepitude. Mradhon Vis stood outside the gate - sore and much out of sorts. She was there: she had found herself a young man much the image of Sjekso, who presently held the warmth and the light inside.

He had walked that far.

And finally, knowing what he knew, he did the harder thing, and walked away.