Stealers' Sky

Skarth chuckled and ordered a small pail of beer. While Shmurt saw to that, the old man glanced in surprise at an unlikely pairing in a dim back comer of the main room of the already dim dive. There where eyes less keen might have missed them sat Furtwan Coinpinch, changer and sometimes pusher, and Menostric called the Misadept, the cheapest mage in town. Well, the least expensive, anyhow.

"Watch those two, Shmurt," Skarth said, his staff banging the floor as he headed for the door. "They could steal your eyeballs and ye'd not notice till ye tried looking for 'em!"

The two men in back looked up. "What in the fart was that?" Furtwan demanded.

"Skarth," Shmurt called. "Don't you know ole Skarth?"

Then he returned his gaze to the empty doorway, trying to fathom who in the fart Skarth was and why he seemed almost familiar.

Ole Skarth was making his way up the street and into the market area, his staff bang-banging rather than tap-tapping. So many people thronged here that it felt a lot warmer. Business was brisk these days, what with all the employment available to anyone who could dig, cut stone, lift stone, carry stone, mix or carry or spread mortar, or swing a hammer or pick or sledgehammer. He saw Hummy and her daughter buying meat, real meat, and he was glad; that meant Hummy's husband had gotten on with the many others working in construction; the rebuilding of a better, handsomer, safer, and prettier Sanctuary, according to the official documents tacked up here and there for everyone to read or pretend to read, after nature and two viciously maniacal women and some dyspeptic gods and those outlanders of Tempus's and what some referred to as Nature had done their best to make this old city only a rubble-strewn memory. There was Lambkin buying food for her brothers and father, too, which meant that the latter was no longer taking odd jobs but "workin' regular" in the current popular phrasing, at some aspect of construction.

Skarth bang-banged his way among them and the noise of their comments and dickering, trying to remember to stay bowed and to lurch, when a voice sliced right through all the others:

"Hanse!"

Skarth didn't think fast enough, and did the worst thing possible: he froze and started to turn. He arrested the movement, but knew it was too late. The point was, the voice was an impossibility: Mignureal's. After so many years of noticing each other more than somewhat and then living together up in Firaqa, he and she had agreed to irreconcilable differences. Besides, she had good work and was happy. She remained in Firaqa. Even though this and that had happened along the way so that he had hardly come directly back down to Sanctuary, he knew perfectly well that Mignue could not be in Sanctuary.

The voice sounded like hers just the same, and startled him enough so that he responded and gave himself away. Now he stayed bent while he turned the rest of the way around. He saw her, and sighed. Yes, she sounded like Mignureal all right; and with reason. He was gazing at her younger sister, Jileel, the one who used to peep at him around her mother's voluminous skirts and who now was nearly five feet tall and looked at him steady on from large eyes made even larger and lovelier by kohl, and who appeared to have bought two good melons and stuffed them down her blouse.

His roving gaze showed him that no one seemed to be paying attention, and he lifted a finger to his lips. At the same time he shook his head slightly and moved toward her.

"Shh, I'm supposed to be disguised. How'd you know?"

"Oh, I'd always recognize you, Hanse," she told him almost breathlessly, as if he were unmistakably and indisputably just the best-looking thing in the hemisphere. He stood beside her now, head bent so that the big feathered hat from Firaqa shaded the movement of his lips.

"Why are you disguised, Hanse?"

"Stop saying that." He glanced around. "I'm Skarth, girl, Skarth. Some people bagged me and sold me to slavers. I should be 'way out at sea right now, in the scummy hold of a scummy ship. They don't know I got away. I don't want them to know until I'm ready. Right now I'm trying to find out where the main one lives."

"Oh. Oh, Han-Skarth, how awful!" Her hand rushed to her heart in a girlish way and when it banged her chest he'd have sworn it bounced. "You were al-almost, you were aimo-oh, oh!"

He rolled his eyes for no one's benefit but his own and nodded. "Right. It hurt, and cost me a lot of time and trouble. Worse, I owe a certain grasping snake a fat favor and a lot of gold."

"Gold!"

Again Hanse rolled his eyes. He had to get away from here, from her. "You know what they call me?"

She nodded with some pride and an after-all-I'm-not-just-a-child attitude. "Of course. Shad-"

He interrupted quickly. "Right. Well, watch that shadow right over there and you'll know why."

She turned her head and partly her body to look in the direction he indicated, and Hanse took a sideward step and a backward one, grunted when he backed into someone's fat bottom, turned, and hurried down a narrow street. More walking and a few turns brought him to Red Court, where he did indeed live, in a decent second-floor room equipped with a huge old wagon wheel of solid wood. By the time he had opened the door he had straightened up and stepped into the room with his normal gait, a smooth gliding pace that jarred no part of his body.

An emphatically red cat of improbable size greeted him with an emphatic and distinctly accusatory noise. Somehow the animal's eyes looked accusing, too. Then its nose twitched a few times and its entire demeanor changed to one of loving cajolery while its emerald gaze fixed in a stare on the small pail its man carried. It banged its sinuous body constantly against its human's legs while Hanse moved to the little kitchen area and poured beer into an orange bowl that was larger than anyone would expect to be a cat's.

"Sorry I had to leave you so long, Notable," he was saying, "but Skarth can't be seen with that big red monster too many people already know is Shadowspawn's shadow. Here you-dammit, Notable, ease up, you'll spill the beer and me too!"

He had to hold the bowl up while he squatted to restrain the cat long enough to get the bowlful of beer on the floor with the other hand. That operation was no simple one; Notable was large, heavy, and squirming like a barrel of worms. Released, he attacked the beer like an army of thirsty horses finding an oasis after days on the desert.

Hanse, called Shadowspawn and more recently Skarth, stepped back and away, paused to set his sense of direction, and thrust his left hand up his right sleeve. That hand whipped up and back just past his ear as he spun. The arm snapped forward and a long flat piece of steel appeared with a thunk m the wagon wheel set up against the far wall. Getting the thing up here had not been easy, but it was perfect, a solid wheel of wood joined by wooden pegs, not nails. He had removed the iron rim. Now the wheel showed numerous holes and gouges, the marks of throwing practice with hiltless, guardless knives and stars. The hub was particularly chewed up, while the wall above and around the target was unmarked.

"Damn. I was so concerned with getting beer for you and trying to be a limpy old man I forgot to buy anything to eat. Anything here or have you eaten it all? A couple of big rats haven't come in and emptied the larder, have they?"

Notable glanced up from his bowl, whiskers dripping, and gave Hanse a cold stare.

All in blue as ever, Strick sat alone. Before him on his blue-draped desk rested a small box and, on a scrap of parchment, several strands of human hair. Hair and casket had come to him from the hands of Shadowspawn, who had them from the privy chambers of Marype the mage. The hair was the puzzler; to a man of Strick's talents its aura was distinctly that of Markmor, and yet it was not brown or gray, but silverblond. Both Avenestra and his own examinations assured him that these hairs had not been dyed. The hair was Marype's. The ... owner seemed to be Markmor.