Thieves World Part 20

'Do come in.'

She opened the door for him, pleased to see by the hesitation in his step that he was unaware that he would be entering her parlour and boudoir.

'I have come to collect the taxes!' he said quickly. His military precision did not completely conceal his awe and vague embarra.s.sment at viewing the royal and erotic scene displayed before him.

He did not turn as Myrtis shut the door behind him and quietly slid a concealed bolt into place.

'You have very nearly undone me, captain,' she said with downcast eyes and a light touch on his arm. It is not so easy as you might think to raise such a large sum of money.'

She lifted the ebony box inlaid with pearl from the table beside her bed and carried it slowly to him. He hesitated before taking it from her arms.

'I must count it, madame,' he said almost apologetically.

'I understand. You will find that it is all there. My word is good.'

'You ... you are much different now from how you seemed two days ago.'

'It is the difference between night and day.'

He began a.s.sembling piles of gold on her ledger table in front of the silver tray with the qualis.

'We have been forced to cut back our orders to the town's merchants in order to pay you.'

From the surprised yet thoughtful look he gave her, Myrtis guessed that the h.e.l.l Hounds had begun to hear complaints and anxious whinings from the respectable parts of town as Mikkun and his friends called back their loans and credit.

'Still,' she continued, T realize that you are doing only what you have been told to do. It's not you personally who is to blame if any of the merchants and purveyors suffer because the Street no longer functions as it once did.'

Zaibar continued shuffling his piles-of coins around, only half-listening to Myrtis. He had half the gold in the box neatly arranged when Myrtis slipped the gla.s.s stopper out of the qualis decanter..

'Will you join me in a gla.s.s of qualis, since it is not your fault and we still have a few luxuries in our larder. They tell me a damp fog lies heavy on the streets.'

He looked up from his counting and his eyes brightened at the sight of the deep red liqueur. The common variety of qualis, though still expensive, had a duller colour and was inclined to visible sediment. A man of his position might live a full life and never glimpse a fine, pure qualis, much less be offered a gla.s.s of it. Clearly the h.e.l.l Hound was tempted.

'A small gla.s.s, perhaps.'

She poured two equally full gla.s.ses and set them both on the table in front of him while she replaced the stopper and took the bottle to the table by her bed.

An undetectable glance in a side mirror confirmed that Zaibar lifted the gla.s.s farthest from him. Calmly she returned and raised the other.

'A toast then. To the future of your prince and to the Aphrodisia House!'

The gla.s.ses clinked.

The potion Lythande had made was brewed in part from the same berries as the qualis itself. The fine liqueur made a perfect concealing dilutant. Myrtis could taste the subtle difference the charm itself made in the normal flavour of the intoxicant, but Zaibar, who had never tasted even the common qualis, a.s.sumed that the extra warmth was only a part of the legendary mystique of the liqueur.

When he had finished his drink, Myrtis swallowed the last others and waited patiently for the faint flush which would confirm that the potion was working.

It appeared in Zaibar first. He became bored with his counting, fondling one coin while his eyes drifted off towards nothingness. Myrtis took the coin from his fingers. The potion took longer to affect her, and its action when it did was lessened by the number of times she had taken it before and by the age inhibiting spells Lythande wove about her. She had not needed the potion, however, to summon an attraction towards the handsome soldier nor to coax him to his feet and then to her bed.

Zaibar protested that he was not himself and did not understand what was happening to him. Myrtis did not trouble herself to argue with him. Lythande's potion was not one to rouse a wild, blind l.u.s.t, but one which endowed a lifelong affection in the drinker. The pure qualis played a part in weakening his resistance. She held him behind the curtains of her bed until he had no doubt of his love for her. Then she helped him dress again.

'I'll show you the secrets of the Aphrodisia House,' she whispered in his ear.

'I believe I have already found them.'

'There are more.'

Myrtis took him by the hand, leading him to one of the drapery-covered walls.

She pushed aside the fabric; released a well-oiled catch; took a sconce from the wall then led him into a dark, but airy, pa.s.sage way.'

'Walk carefully in my footsteps, Zaibar - I would not want to lose you to the oubliettes. Perhaps you have wondered why the Street is outside the walls and its buildings are so old and well-built? Perhaps you think Sanctuary's founders wished to keep us outside their fair city? What you do not know is that these houses - especially the older ones like the Aphrodisia - are not really outside the walls at all. My house is built of stone four feet thick. The shutters on our windows are aged wood from the mountains. We have our own wells and storerooms which can"supply us -and the city - for weeks, if necessary. Other pa.s.sages lead away from here towards the Swamp of Night Secrets, or into Sanctuary and the governor's palace itself. Whoever has ruled in Sanctuary has always sought our cooperation in moving men and arms if a siege is laid.'

She showed the speechless captain catacombs where a sizeable garrison could wait in complete concealment. He drank water from a deep well whose water had none of the brackish taste so common in the seacoast town. Above he could hear the sounds of parties at the Aphrodisia and the other houses. Zaibar's military eye took all this in, but his mind saw Myrtis, candle-lit in the black gown, as a man's dream come true, and the underground fortress she was revealing to him as a soldier's dream come true. The potion worked its way with him. He wanted both Myrtis and the fortress for his own to protect and control.

'There is so much about Sanctuary that you Rankans know nothing about. You tax the Street and cause havoc with trade in the city. You wish to close the Street and send all of us, including myself, to the slave pens or worse. Your walls will be breachable 'then. There are men in Sanctuary who would stop at nothing to control these pa.s.sages, and they know the Swamp and the palace better than you or your children could ever hope to.'

She showed him a wall flickering with runes and magic signs. Zaibar went to touch it and found his fingers singed for his curiosity.

'These warding walls keep us safe now, but they will fade if we are not here to renew them properly. Smugglers and thieves will find the entrances we have kept invulnerable for generations. And you, Zaibar, who wish that Sanctuary will become a place of justice and order, will know in your heart that you are responsible, because you knew what was here and let the others destroy it.'

'No, Myrtis. So long as I live, none of this shall be harmed.'

'There is no other way. Do you not already have your orders to levy a second tax?'

He nodded.

'We have already begun to use the food stored in these bas.e.m.e.nts. The girls are not happy; the merchants are not happy. The Street will die. The merchants will charge higher prices, and the girls will make their way to the streets. There is nowhere else for them to go. Perhaps Jubal will take-'

'1 do not think that the Street will suffer such a fate. Once the prince understands the true part you and the others play, he will agree to a nominal tax which would be applied to maintaining the defence of Sanctuary and therefore be returned to you.'

Myrtis smiled to herself. The battle was won. She held his arm tightly and no longer fought the effect of the adulterated qualis in her own emotions. They found an abandoned officer's quarters and made love on its bare wooden-slats bed. and again when they returned to the parlour of the Aphrodisia House.

The night-candle had burned down to its last k.n.o.b by the time Myrtis released the hidden bolt and let the h.e.l.l Hound captain rejoin his men. Lythande was in the room behind her as soon as she shut the door.

'Are you safe now?' the magician asked with a laugh.

'I believe so.'

'The potion?'

'A success, as always. I have not been in love like this for a long time. It is pleasant. I almost do not mind knowing how empty and hurt I will feel as I watch him grow old.'

'Then why use something like the potion? Surely the catacombs themselves would have been enough to convince a h.e.l.l Hound?'

'Convince him of what? That the defences of Sanctuary should not be entrusted to wh.o.r.es and courtesans? Except for your potion, there is nothing else to bind him to the idea that we - that I should remain here as I always have. There was no other way!'

'You're right,' Lythande said, nodding. 'Will he return to visit you?'

'He will care, but I do not think he will return. That was not the purpose of the drug.'

She opened the narrow gla.s.s-paned doors to the balcony overlooking the emptying lower rooms. The soldiers were gone. She looked back into the room. The three hundred gold pieces still lay half-counted on the table next to the empty decanter. He might return.

'I feel as young as I look,' she whispered to the unnoticing rooms. 'I could satisfy every man in this house if I took the notion to, or if anyone of them had half the magnificence of my Zaibar.'

Myrtis turned back to an empty room and went to sleep alone.

THE SECRET OF THE BLUE STAR.

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

On a night in Sanctuary, when the streets bore a false glamour in the silver glow of full moon, so that every ruin seemed an enchanted tower and every dark street and square an island of mystery, the mercenary-magician Lythande sallied forth to seek adventure.

Lythande had but recently returned - if the mysterious comings and goings of a magician can be called by so prosaic a name -from guarding a caravan across the Grey Wastes to Twand. Somewhere in the Wastes, a gaggle of desert rats - two -legged rats with poisoned steel teeth - had set upon the caravan, not knowing it was guarded by magic, and had found themselves fighting skeletons that howled and fought with eyes of flame; and at their centre a tall magician with a blue star between blazing eyes, a star that shot lightnings of a cold and paralysing flame. So the desert rats ran, and never stopped running until they reached Aurvesh, and the tales they told did Lythande no harm except in the ears of the pious.

And so there was gold in the pockets of the long, dark, magician's robe, or perhaps concealed in whatever,'dwelling sheltered Lythande.

For at the end, the caravan master had been almost more afraid of Lythande than he was of the bandits, a situation which added to the generosity with which he rewarded the magician. According to custom, Lythande neither smiled nor frowned, but remarked, days later, to Myrtis, the proprietor of the Aphrodisia House in the Street of Red Lanterns, that sorcery, while a useful skill and filled with many aesthetic delights for the contemplation of the philosopher, in itself put no beans on the table.

A curious remark, that, Myrtis pondered, putting away the ounce of gold Lythande had bestowed upon her in consideration of a secret which lay many years behind them both. Curious that Lythande should speak of beans on the table, when no one but herself had ever seen a bite of food or a drop of drink pa.s.s the magician's lips since the blue star had adorned that high and narrow brow. Nor had any woman in the Quarter even been able to boast that a great magician had paid for her favours, or been able to imagine how such a magician behaved in that situation when all men were alike reduced to flesh and blood.

Perhaps Myrtis could have told if she would; some of her girls thought so, when, as sometimes happened, Lythande came to the Aphrodisia House and was closeted long with its owner; even, on rare intervals, for an entire night. It was said, of Lythande, that the Aphrodisia House itself had been the magician's gift to Myrtis, after a famous adventure still whispered in the bazaar, involving an evil wizard, two horse-traders, a caravan master, and a few a.s.sorted toughs who had prided themselves upon never giving gold for any woman and thought it funny to cheat an honest working woman. None of them had ever showed their faces -what was left of them - in Sanctuary again, and Myrtis boasted that she need never again sweat to earn her living, and never again entertain a man, but would claim her madam's privilege of a solitary bed.

And then, too, the girls thought, a magician of Lythande's stature could have claimed the most beautiful women from Sanctuary to the mountains beyond Ilsig: not courtesans alone, but princesses and n.o.blewomen and priestesses would have been for Lythande's taking. Myrtis had doubtless been beautiful in her youth, and certainly she boasted enough of the princes and wizards and travellers who had paid great sums for her love. She was beautiful still (and of course there were those who said that Lythande did not pay her, but that, on the contrary, Myrtis paid the magician great sums to maintain her ageing beauty with strong magic) but her hair had gone grey and she no longer troubled to dye it with henna or goldenwash from Tyrisis-beyond-the-sea.

But if Myrtis were not the woman who knew how Lythande behaved in that most elemental of situations, then there was no woman in Sanctuary who could say.

Rumour said also that Lythande called up female demons from the Grey Wastes, to couple in lechery, and certainly Lythande was neither the first nor the last magician of whom that could be said.

But on this night Lythande sought neither food nor drink nor the delights of amorous entertainment; although Lythande was a great frequenter of taverns, no man had ever yet seen a drop of ale or mead or fire-drink pa.s.s the barrier of the magician's lips. Lythande walked along the far edge of the bazaar, skirting the old rim of the governor's palace, keeping to the shadows in defiance of footpads and cutpurses, that love for shadows which made the folk of the city say that Lythande could appear and disappear into thin air.

Tall and thin, Lythande, above the height of a tall man, lean to emaciation, with the blue star-shaped tattoo of the magiciaft-adept above thin, arching eyebrows; wearing a long, hooded robe which melted into the shadows. Clean -shaven, the face of Lythande, or beardless - none had come close enough, in living memory, to say whether this was the whim of an effeminate or the hairlessness of a freak. The hair beneath the hood was as long and luxuriant as a woman's, but greying, as no woman in this city of harlots would have allowed it to do.

Striding quickly along a shadowed wall, Lythande stepped through an open door, over which the sandal of Thufir, G.o.d of pilgrims, had been nailed up for luck; but the footsteps were so soft, and the hooded robe blended so well into the shadows, that eyewitnesses would later swear, truthfully, that they had seen Lythande appear from the air, protected by sorceries, or by a cloak of invisibility.

Around the hearth fire, a group of men were banging their mugs together noisily to the sound of a rowdy drinking-song, strummed on a worn and tinny lute - Lythande knew it belonged to the tavern-keeper, and could be borrowed - by a young man, dressed in fragments of foppish finery, torn and slashed by the chances of the road. He was sitting lazily, with one knee crossed over the other; and when the rowdy song died away, the young man drifted into another, a quiet love-song from another time and another country. Lythande had known the song, more years ago than bore remembering, and in those days Lythande the magician had borne another name and had known little of sorcery. When the song died, Lythande had stepped from the shadows, visible, and the firelight glinted on the blue star, mocking at the centre of the high forehead.

There was a little muttering in the tavern, but they were not unaccustomed to Lythande's invisible comings and goings. The young man raised eyes which were surprisingly blue beneath the black hair elaborately curled above his brow. He was slender and agile, and Lythande marked the rapier at his side, which looked well handled, and the amulet, in the form of a coiled snake, at his throat. The young man said, 'Who are you, who has the habit of coming and going into thin air like that?'

'One who compliments your skill at song.' Lythande flung a coin to the tapster's boy. 'Will you drink?'

'A minstrel never refuses such an invitation. Singing is dry work.' But when the drink was brought, he said, 'Not drinking with me, then?'

'No man has ever seen Lythande eat or drinK,' muttered one of the men in the circle round them.

'Why, then, I hold that unfriendly,' cried the young minstrel. 'A friendly drink between comrades shared is one thing; but I am no servant to sing for pay or to drink except as a friendly gesture!'

Lythande shrugged, and the blue star above the high brow began to s.h.i.+mmer and give forth blue light. The onlookers slowly edged backward, for when a wizard who wore the blue star was angered, bystanders did well to be out of the way.

The minstrel set down the lute, so it would be well out of range if he must leap to his feet. Lythande knew, by the excruciating slowness of his movements and great care, that he had already shared a good many drinks with chance-met comrades. But the minstrel's hand did not go to his sword-hilt but instead closed like a fist over the amulet in the form of a snake. '

'You are like no man I have ever met before,' he observed mildly, and Lythande, feeling inside the little ripple, nerve-long, that told a magician he was in the presence of spell-casting, hazarded quickly that the amulet was one of those which would not protect its master unless the wearer first stated a set number of truths - usually three or five - about the owner's attacker or foe. Wary, but amused, Lythande said, 'A true word. Nor am I like any man you will ever meet, live you never so long, minstrel.'

The minstrel saw, beyond the angry blue glare of the star, a curl of friendly mockery in Lythande's mouth. He said, letting the amulet go, 'And I wish you no ill; and you wish me none, and those are true sayings too, wizard, hey? And there's an end of that. But although perhaps you are like to no other, you are not the only wizard I have seen in Sanctuary who bears a blue star about his forehead.'

Now the blue star blazed rage, but not for the minstrel. They both knew it. The crowd around them had all mysteriously discovered that they had business elsewhere. The minstrel looked at the empty benches.

'I must go elsewhere to sing for my supper, it seems.'

'I meant you no offence when I refused to share a drink,' said Lythande. 'A magician's vow is not as lightly overset as a lute. Yet I may guest-gift you with dinner and drink in plenty without loss of dignity, and in return ask a service of a friend, may I not?'

'Such is the custom of my country. Cappen Varra thanks you, magician.'

'Tapster! Your best dinner for my guest, and all he can drink tonight!'

'For such liberal guesting I'll not haggle about the service,' Cappen Varra said, and set to the smoking dishes brought before him. As he ate, Lythande drew from the folds of his robe a small pouch containing a quant.i.ty of sweet-smelling herbs, rolled them into a blue-grey leaf, and touched his ring to spark the roll alight. He drew on the smoke, which drifted up sweet and greyish.

'As for the service, it is nothing so great; tell me all you know of this other wizard who wears the blue star. I know of none other of my order south of Azehur, and I would be certain you did not see me, nor my wraith.'

Cappen Varra sucked at a marrow-bone and wiped his fingers fastidiously on the tray-cloth beneath the meats. He bit into a ginger-fruit before replying.

'Not you, wizard, nor your fetch or doppelganger; this one had shoulders brawnier by half, and he wore no sword, but two daggers cross-girt astride his hips. His beard was black; and his left hand missing three fingers.'

'Us of the Thousand Eyes! Rabben the Half-handed, here in Sanctuary! Where did you see him, minstrel?'

'I saw him crossing the bazaar; but he bought nothing that I saw. And I saw him in the Street of Red Lanterns, talking to a woman. What service am I to do for you, magician?'

'You have done it.' Lythande gave silver to the tavern keeper - so much that the surly man bade Shalpa's cloak cover him as he went - and laid another coin, gold this time, beside the borrowed lute. - 'Redeem your harp; that one will do your voice no boon.' But when the minstrel raised his head in thanks, the magician had gone unseen into the shadows.

Pocketing the gold, the minstrel asked, 'How did he know that? And how did he go out?'

'Shalpa the swift alone knows,' the tapster said. 'Flew out by the smoke-hole in the chimney, for all I ken! That one needs not the night-dark cloak of Shalpa to cover him, for he has one of his own. He paid for your drinks, good sir; what will you have?' And Cappen Varra proceeded to get very drunk, that being the wisest thing to do when one becomes entangled unawares in the private affairs of a wizard.

Outside in the street, Lythande paused to consider. Rabben the Half-handed was no friend; yet there was no reason his presence in Sanctuary must deal with Lythande, or personal revenge. If it were business concerned with the Order of the Blue Star, if Lythande must lend Rabben aid, or the Half-handed had been sent to summon all the members of the Order, the star they both wore would have given warning.

Yet it would do no harm to make certain. Walking swiftly, the magician had reached a line of old stables behind the governor's palace. There was silence and secrecy for magic. Lythande stepped into one of the little side alleys, drawing up the magician's cloak until no light remained, slowly withdrawing farther and farther into the silence until nothing remained anywhere in the world -anywhere in the universe but the light of the blue star ever glowing in front. Lythande remembered how it had been set there, and at what cost - the price an adept paid for power.

The blue glow gathered, fulminated in many-coloured patterns, pulsing and glowing, until Lythande stood within the light; and there, in the Place That Is Not, seated upon a throne carved apparently from sapphire, was the Master of the Star.

'Greetings to you, fellow star, star-born, shyryu.' The terms of endearment could mean fellow, companion, brother, sister, beloved, equal, pilgrim; its literal meaning was sharer of starlight. 'What brings you into the Pilgrim Place this night from afar?'

'The need for knowledge, star-sharer. Have you sent one to seek me out in Sanctuary?'