Shadow Of Sanctuary

She struggled, which motion only felt the better in his hands, and she gave out muffled cries, which were far from loud, his mouth covering hers the while. He held her tight and sought with his eyes for some more convenient alcove among the broken amphorae and barrels, a place where they might not be disturbed.

All at once another sound penetrated the fog of sense and sound, the scuff of another foot near him. Sjekso started to spin himself and his victim about, went the least bit over to that foot and had a hand clamped on to his own chin, his head jerked back, and a deadly keen blade at his throat in the same instant.

'Let the lady go,' a male whisper suggested, and he carefully, trading in all his remaining advantage, relaxed his hands and let them fall, wondering wildly all the while whether his only chance might be in some wild try at escape. The woman in the edge of his vision stepped back, brushed at her robes, adjusted her hood. The knife rode razor-edged at his throat and the hand which held his chin gave him nothing.

Mradhon Vis kept his grip and held the ruffian just off his balance, looked in a moment's distraction at the lady in question ... at a severe and dusky face in the faint light of the alleyway. She was beautiful. His romantical soul was touched - that seldom-afforded self which launched itself mostly in the wake of more profitable motives. 'Be off,' he told Sjekso, and flung the villain a good several body lengths down the alley; and Sjekso scrambled up and set to his heels without stopping to see anything.

'Wait!' the woman called after Sjekso. The would-be rapist spun about with his back to a wall, ducking an imagined blow from behind. Mradhon Vis, dagger still in hand, stood facing him, utterly confounded.

'The boy and I are old friends,' she said - and to Sjekso: 'Isn't it so?'

Sjekso straightened with his back against the wall and managed a bow, if a wobbling one ... managed a sneer, his braggadocio recovered in the face of a man he, after all, knew from the dice table that night - and Mradhon Vis took a tighter and furious grip on his dagger, knowing this vermin at least from the tables at the Unicorn.

But feminine fingers touched very lightly on his bare arm. 'A misunderstanding,' the woman said, very soft and low. 'But thank you for stepping in, all the same. You have some skill, don't you? Out of the army, maybe - I ask you, sir ... I have need to find someone ... with that skill. To guard me. I have to come and go hereabouts. I could pay, if you could find me someone like yourself, a friend maybe - who might serve...'

'At your service,' Sjekso said, with a second grander flourish. 'I know my way around.'

But the woman never turned to see. Her eyes were all for Mradhon, dark and glittering in the night. 'He's one, in fact, I might sometimes want protection/row. - Do you know someone who might be interested?'

Mradhon straightened his back and took a superior stance. 'I've served as bodyguard now and again. And as it happens, I'm at liberty.'

'Ah,' she said, a hand to her robed breast, which outlined female curves in the shadow. And she turned at once to the confused villain, who had taken advantage of the moment to slip towards the shadows and the corner. 'No, no, wait. I did promise you this evening. I had no right to put you off; and I want to talk with you. Be patient.' - A glance then back, her hand bringing a purse from beneath her robes. She loosed the strings and took out a gold coin that caught Mradhon's whole attention, the more so when she dropped the heavy purse into his hand. Only the one coin she held, it winking colourless bright in the moonlight, and she held that up like an icon for Sjekso's eyes - another look at Mradhon: 'I lodge seventh down from this corner, the first steps you'll come to that have a newel on the rail: on your right as you go. Go there. Learn the place so you can find it tomorrow morning, and be waiting there for me at midmorning. I'll be there. And the purse is yours.'

He considered the weight in his palm, heavy as with gold. 'I'll find it,' he said, and, less than confident of the situation at hand: 'Are you sure you don't want me to stay about?'

Black brows drew together, a frown uncommonly grim. 'I have no doubts to my safety. - Ah, your name, sir. When I pay, I like to know that.'

'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 anticipation, 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 gri

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 bastard 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.'