'Vis. Mradhon Vis.'

'From-'

'Northward. A lot of places.'

'We'll talk. Tomorrow morning. Go on, now. Believe me, that the quarrel wasn't what it seemed.'

'Lady,' he murmured - he had known polite company once. He clenched the purse in his fist and turned off in the direction she had named - not without a backward look. Sjekso still waited where he had fixed himself against the wall; but the lady seemed to know he would look back, and turned a shadowy look on him.

Mradhon moved on quickly and further along the winding way, stopped and anxiously shook out the purse into his hand, a spill of five heavy pieces in gold and half a dozen of silver. Hot and cold went through him, like the shock of a blow, a tremor through things that were ... A second glance back, but buildings had come between him and the woman and her bought-boy Sjekso. Well, he had hired to stranger folk and no few worse to look on. He gave a twitch of his shoulders at that proceedings back there and shrugged it off. There was gold in his possession, a flood of gold. His gallantry had come from his own poverty, from one look at the woman's fine clothing and a sure knowledge that Sjekso Kinzan was all hollow when pushed. And for that gold in his hand he would have waited in the alley all night, or beaten Sjekso to fine rags, no questions asked.

It occurred to him while he went that it might involve more than that, but he went, all the same.

The woman looked back at Sjekso and smiled, a fervid smile which made wider and wider chaos of Sjekso's grasp of the situation. He stood away from his wall and - sobered as he had been in the encounter, deprived of the vaporous warmth of the wine in his blood - still he recovered something of antic.i.p.ation, re estimated his own considerable animal charm in the light of the lady's sultry dark eyes, in the moonlike gleam of the gold coin she held up before him. He grinned, his confidence restored, stood. easier still as she came to him - it might have been the wine after all, this new blush of heat; it might have been her slim fingers which touched at his collar and drew a line with the edge of the coin down among the fine hairs of his chest, disturbing there the chain of the luckpiece he wore.

His luck had improved, he reckoned, laying it all to his way with women. She had liked it after all... they all did; and she might be parted from more than a golden coin, and if she thought of using him and that b.a.s.t.a.r.d northerner one against the other, good: there was a chance of paying off Mradhon Vis. He had skills the northerner did not; and he knew how to get the most out of them.

He took most of his living from women, in one way or the other.

'What's your name?' she asked him.

'Sjekso Kinzan.'

'Sjekso. I have a place ... not the lodgings where I sent that fellow; that's business. But my real house... near the river. A little wine, a soft bed ...

I'll bet you're good.'

He laughed. 'I make it a rule never to go out of my own territory till I know the terms. Here's good enough. Right over here. And I'll bet you don't care.'

'Mine's Ischade,' she murmured distractedly, as he put his hands up under the robes. She swayed against him, her own hands on him, and he found the coin and took it from her unresisting fingers. She brushed his lips with her own and urged him on. 'My name's Ischade.'

2.

A corpse was no uncommon sight in the Maze. But one sprawled in the middle of the Serpentine, in the first light of the sun - the potboy of the Unicorn found the blond male corpse when he came out to heave the slops, a corpse on the inn's very doorstep, a body quite stiff and cold, and he knew Sjekso Kinzan. He spun on his heel and started to run back in - thought again and darted, back to search for valuables ... after all, some less acquainted and deserving person might come along. He found the bra.s.s luckpiece, found the purse ... empty, except for an old nail and a bit of lint - dropped the luckpiece down his own collar, jumped up and ran inside in breathless haste, to spill his news to the morning's first stirrers-forth in the tavern; and the fact of one of the Unicorn's regular patrons lying stiff at the door brought a stamping up and down the stair and a general outpouring of curious and half-awake ovemighters.

That was how it came to Hanse, a disturbance under Minsy Zithyk's rented window next door.

The gathering around the body in the street was solemn ... partly a kind of respect and partly morning headaches, more and more onlookers arriving as the commotion became its own reason for being. Hanse was one of the first, stood with his arms clenched into a tight fold - he had his daggers: had them about his person natural as breathing. His scowl and awakened-owl stare at the corpse of Sjekso Kinzan, his arms about his ribs holding his spine stiff- warned Minsy Zithyk off. She stood snuffling and holding her own ribs, doubtless with the other half of a throbbing headache. Hanse wanted no hanging-on, now, of Sjekso's longtime woman. The dice game and the wager stuck in his mind and he felt eyes on him, himself part of the morning's gossip, with a man he had diced with lying cold in the soiled stream of a drain.

'Who got him?' Hanse asked finally, and there was a general shrugging of shoulders. 'Who?' Hanse snapped, looking round at the onlookers. A corpse was indeed no novelty in the Maze, but an otherwise young and healthy one, with no mark of violence on it... but a man on the doorstep of the tavern he frequented, a turn or two of the alleys to his own lodgings ...

There were amenities like territory. A man was never a.s.sured ... but there were places and places, and when he was in his own place, he was least likely to end up among the morning's debris. There were stirrings among the crowd, discomfort - with Hanse, for one, whose smallish size meant a temper backed with knives, a bad reputation for every kind of mischief.

And his sullen, headachy stare pa.s.sed right round to a stranger in the territory - to one Mradhon Vis; to a new and frequent patron at the Unicorn. 'You,' Hanse said. 'You left about the same time last night. You see anything?'

A shrug. A useless question. No one in the Maze saw anything. But Vis looked too thin-lipped about the shrug and Hanse looked back with a blacker stare still had sudden awareness of the silence of the crowd when he spoke, of eyes on him; and he unfolded his arms and thought of how they had jostled in a doorway last night, Sjekso and Mradhon Vis, and Sjekso had laughed and acted his usual flippant self at Vis's expense. Hanse drew quiet conclusions - quiet because he cut a mean figure at the moment, having got off with a dead man's last cash and last pleasure ... he swept a glance about at faces dour with their own private conclusions. No love lost on him or dead Sjekso; but Sjekso being local and dead was the focus of pity, while regarding himself- there was quite another thing in the air.

Vis started to leave, edging away through the crowd. "That's the one to look at,' Hanse said. 'Hey, you! You don't like the questions, do you? The garrison threw you out, hey? You come back here, wh.o.r.eson coward, you don't turn your back on me.'

'He's crazy,' Vis said, stopped behind an unwilling screen of onlookers who were trying to melt in all directions, but Mradhon kept with the migrating cover.

'Figure who got his money and his woman,, you figure that and wonder who did for him, that's who...'

Hanse went for the knives. 'Wasn't no mark on him,' a youngish voice was shrilling. The crowd was swinging wildly out of the interval Vis was busy preserving. Minsy yelled, and several strong and larger arms wound themselves into Hanse's elbows and about his middle. He heaved and kicked to no use while Mradhon Vis, in the clear, straightened his person and his clothing.

'Crazy,' Vis said again, and Hanse poured invective on him and most especially on those holding him from his knives - cold, sweating afraid, because Vis might do anything, or the crowd might, and the knives were all he had. But Vis walked off then, at an increasing pace, and Hanse launched another kick and a torrent of abuse on those holding him.

'Easy.' The grip on his left was Cappen Varra's, an arm tucked elbow to elbow into his arm and a hand locked on his wrist; he had no grudge with the minstrel.

It was a calm voice, a cultivated, better-than-thou voice: Hanse hated Varra at the moment, but the grip persuaded and the object of his rage was off down the street. He took his weight on his own feet and slowly, brushing off his clothes while he stood fairly shaking with his anger, Varra eased up and let him go.

Igan on the other side, big, not very bright Igan, let go his other arm, and claps on his shoulders and sympathy offered ... started to settle his stomach and persuade him he had some credit here. 'Let's have a drink,' Varra said. 'The corpse-takers will get the rumour - do you want to be standing here conspicuous?

Come on inside.'

He went as far as the door of the Unicorn, looked back, and there was Minsy standing over Sjekso, sniffling; and Sjekso lying there a great deal sadder, open-eyed, while the crowd started away under the same logic.

Hanse wanted the drink.

Mradhon Vis turned the comer, none following, stopped against an alley wall and let the tremors pa.s.s from his limbs. Ugly, that back there. Corpses, he had seen - had created his share, in and out of mercenary service. He had no wish to take on useless trouble ... not now, not with gold in his boot and a real prospect of more. A bodyguard sometimes, but he was not big enough for hired muscle; and with a surly and foreign look - even guard jobs were hard come by. He meant to be on time for this one. A patron who could come up with a fistful of gold on a whim was one to cultivate - if only her throat was still uncut. And that thought worried him: that was what had drawn him, against his natural and wary instincts, to that noisy scene outside the Vulgar Unicorn - a body he had last seen alive and escorting the patron who was his latest and most fervent hope.

He was more than concerned.

Other alarums sounded in his mind, warnings of greater complexity, but he refused them, because they led to suspicions of traps, and connivances; he had a knife in his belt, his wits about him, and no little experience of employers of all sorts, no few of whom had had notions of refusing him his pay at the end ...

one way and the other.

3.

The Vulgar Unicorn still thumped with comings and goings, an untidy lot of early-moming patrons and irregulars. For his own part Hanse drank down his ale and nursed his head back to size, across the table from Cappen. He had no inclination to talk or to be the centre of anything at the moment.

'They've got him off,' the potboy said from the door. So the corpse was gone.

That cleared out some of the traffic. Inquiry and snoopery might be close behind the corpsetakers. 'Excuse me,' Cappen Varra said, likewise discreet, and left his place at the table, bound for the door. Hanse recovered his equilibrium and stood up from the bench amid the general flow of bodies outward.

Someone touched his arm, a feathery light hand. He looked back, expecting Minsy, in no mood for her - and looked up instead into eyes like a statue's eyes, as unfocused and as vague, in a male face old/young and beardless. The man was blind.

'Hanse called Shadowsp.a.w.n?' The voice was like the man, smooth and sere.

'What's my business with you?'

'You lost a friend.'

'Ha. No friend. Acquaintance. What's it to you and me?'

The groping hand caught his arm and directed it to the other hand, which caught his fingers - he began to resist this eerie familiarity, and then felt the unmistakable metal heaviness of a coin.

'I'm listening.'

'My employer has more for you.'

'Where?'

'Not here. Do you want a name? Come outside.'

The blind man would have taken him out the front, among the others, following the crowd. Hanse pulled him instead to another door, out into the back alley where few had gone and those already vanished. 'Now,' Hanse said, taking the blind man by the arm and backing him against the wall. 'Who?'

'EnasYorl.'

He dropped his hand from the blind man's arm. 'Him. For what?'

'He wants to talk to you. You come - recommended. And you'll be paid.'

Hanse took in his breath and fingered his coin, looked down at it a s.p.a.ce, found it new minted and heavy silver, and reckoned uneasily in what quarters he was recommended. Coin of that denomination was not so easily come by ... but Enas Yorl - the wizard took few visitors ... and there were things lately amiss in Sanctuary. Things larger than Hanse Shadowsp.a.w.n. Rumours filtered down into the Maze.

Sjekso dead, unmarked, and Enas Yorl - offering money to talk to a thief: the world was mad. He walked it for the narrow lane it was.

'All right,' he said, because Yorl had a long reach and because ignorance scared him. 'You show me.'

The blind man took his hand, and they went, down the alley and out again. It was so unfaltering a progress, so lacking a blind man's moves, that Hanse inevitably suspected some sham, such as beggars used - an actor and a good one, he thought, appreciating art.

Mradhon Vis fretted, paced below the balcony at the wooden stairs he had found last night. It was a place as sordid as any in the Maze, unpainted boards and age-slimed stone, a place atilt towards the alley and propped on boards and braces. It breathed decrepitude.

And more and more as he waited in this unlikely place, he gnawed on the thought of his hoped-for patron ... dead, it might be, victim along with Sjekso, lying unfound as yet in some other alleyway. He had been mad to have gone off and left a woman in the backways of the Maze; a cat among hounds, that piece... and gone, s.n.a.t.c.hed up, swallowed up - with friends, G.o.ds, more than likely money like that had friends and enemies. His mind built more and grimmer fancies ... of princes and politics and clandestine meetings, this Sjekso perhaps more than he had seemed, this woman casting about money to be rid of a witness too much for the man she was with, an expedience - He built such fancies, paced, stalked finally halfway up the creaking length of the stairs and came back down in indecision - then up again, gathering his courage and his resolve. He reached the swaying balcony, tried the door.

It swung inward, never locked or barred. That startled him. He slipped the knife from his belt and pushed the door all the way open - smelled incense and spices, perfumes. He walked in, pushed the door very gently shut again. A dim light came from a milky parchmented cas.e.m.e.nt, cast colour slantwise on a couch spread with russet silk, on dusty draperies and stacks of cloth and oddments.

Wings snapped and rustled. He spun about into a crouch, found only a large black bird chained to a perch against the wall in which the door was set. His heart settled again. He straightened. He should have smelled the creature: no large bird lived in a place without some fetor ... but the perfume and the incense were that strong, that he had not. He ignored the creature, poked about amid the debris on a table, feminine clutter of small boxes and brocade.

And the steps creaked, outside. He cast about him in a sudden fright, knife at the ready, slid in among the abundant shadows of the room. The steps reached the top, and the bird stirred and beat his wings in gusts as the door opened.

Black robes cast a silhouette against the daylight; the lady turned unerringly in his direction, took no fright at him or the knife, merely closed the door and reached up and dropped her hood from a tumble of midnight hair about a sombre face. 'Mradhon Vis,' she said quietly. She belonged in the dark of this place, amid the clutter of worn and beautiful things. It was incredible that she could ever have walked through sunlight.

'Here,' he said, 'lady.'

'Ischade,' she named herself. 'Do you make free of my lodgings?'

'The man you were with last night. He's dead.'

'I've heard, yes.' The voice was unreadable and cool. 'We parted company. Sad. A handsome boy.' She walked to the slight illumination of the parchment panes, drew an incense wand from others in a dragon vase and added it to the one which was dying, a curl of pale smoke in the light. She looked back then. 'So. I have employment for you. I trust you're not fastidious.'

'Not often.'

'You'll find rewards. Gold. And it might be - further employment.'

'I don't shy off at much.'

'I'll trust not.' She walked near him, and he recalled the knife and nipped it into its sheath. Her eyes followed the move and looked up at him ... grave, so very grave. Women of quality he had seen tended to nutter the eyes; this one stared eye to eye, and he found himself inclined to break the contact, to look down or elsewhere. She extended her hand, close to touching him, a move he thought might be an invitation to take liberties of his own.

And then she drew the hand back and the moment pa.s.sed. She walked over and offered the bird a morsel from the cup at the side of the stand. The creature took it with a great flapping of wings.

'What do you have in mind?' he asked, vexed at this mincing about, with so much at stake. 'It's not legal, I'll guess.'

'It might involve powerful enemies. I can guarantee - equally powerful protections. And the reward. Of course that.'

'Who's to die? Someone else ... like that boy last night?'

She looked about, lifted a brow, then turned her attentions back to the bird, stroked black feathers with a forefinger. 'Priests, perhaps. Does that bother you?'

'Not unduly. A man wonders -'

'The risk is mine. So are the consequences. Only I need someone to take care of physical difficulties. I a.s.sure you I know what I'm about.'

There was more than the scent of incense about the place. Of a sudden there was quite another thing... the smell of wizardry. He gathered that, as he had been picking up the pieces all along. It was not a thing a man expected to find everywhere. But it was here. And there were crimes done in the Maze, by that means and others. Spells, he had dealt with, at least at distance... had a hint then of more rewards than gold. 'You have protections, do you?'

A second time that cool look. 'I a.s.sure you it's well thought out.'

'Protections for me as well.'

'They'd be far less interested in you.' She walked back to the table, to the light, a shadow against it. 'This evening,' she said, 'you'll earn the gold I gave you. But perhaps, just perhaps, you ought to go out again. And come back again when I tell you. To prove you know that my door isn't yours.'

Heat surged to his face, words into his mouth. He thought of the money and it stifled the rest.

'Now,' she said. 'About the other thing you have in mind ... well, that might come later, mightn't it? But you choose, Mradhon Vis. There's gold ... or other rewards. And you can tell me which you'd like. Ah. Both, perhaps. Ambition. But know me better, Mradhon Vis, before you propose anything aloud. You might not like my terms. Take the gold. The likes of Sjekso Kinzan is commoner than you.

And far less to regret.'

So she had killed the boy. Markless, and cold and stiff within sight of the doorway which might have saved him. He thought about it... and the ambition persisted. It was power. And that was more than the money, much more.

'You'll go now,' she said very, very softly. 'I wouldn't tempt you. Consider we have a bargain. Now get out.'

No one talked to him after that fashion ... at least not twice. But he found himself silenced and his steps tending to the door. He stopped there and looked back to prove he could.

'I've needed a man of your sort,' she said, 'in certain ways.'

He walked out, into the sun.

4.

It was one of those neighbourhoods less frequented by the inhabitants of the Maze, and Hanse had a dislocated, uncomfortable feeling in this guide and this place, creeping as they did through the cleaner, wider backways of Sanctuary at large. It was not his territory or close to any of his known boltholes.

And in the shadows of an alley far along the track, his guide paused and shed an inner and ragged cloak from beneath the outer one, proffering it. 'Put it on.

You'll not want to be noticed hereabouts for yourself.'

Hanse took it, not without distaste: it was grey and a ma.s.s of patches. He swung it about his shoulders and it was long enough to hide him down to midcalf.