Wings of Omen

"Sorry," he muttered, and took up the reins and got the horse away, slowly down the street.

Robbed-not of the money only. There were vast gaps in his memory-where he had been; what he had seen.

Roxane. Ischade. He had come back to the river-house. The memory got so far and stopped.

He touched his throat on reflex. You've always mistaken me, she'd said.

The sun was up. Tradesmen went bawling their wares, the housekeepers were out dusting off the steps.

He would have ridden from the gates and saved himself; but like the bay horse he had learned patterns and was caught in them, kept to the path and to duty.

I promised something, he thought in a chill, half-recovered memory.

Gods-what?

REBELS ARENT BORN IN PALACES by Andrew J. Offutt

Offer a prize for the lowest, skungiest dive in Sanctuary, and Sly's Place will win it hands down. That's a good place for hands at Sly's Place, too. Down, near your belt-purse and weapons. Sly's Place is sphinctered in the improbable three way intersection of Ta

Every Maze-denizen and most Downwinders know where Sly's Place is, and yet no one can assign a proper address to it. Its address is not that winding maze-link called the Serpentine. It isn't given as being on the streetlet called Ta

Sly's Place! Name of Father Ils, Sly had taken dropsy and died three years agone, and the dive was still called Sly's Place because no one wanted to admit to owning it or to take responsibility either.

On the other hand, since all that Beyfishfacesin/sorcery problem in the Vulgar Unicorn and the pursuant edict and raid-or raid and edict; who in power could be bothered with niceties where anything in the Maze was concerned? -business waxed at Sly's like the tide when the moon is right, like the moon when the heavens are favorable, like the heavens when the gods are getting along. Someone had to be getting rich off Sly's Place, damn and bless him. Or her.

Sly's was where a pair of rebels/patriots met, and awaited the advent of an invited guest. In a town first occupied by those rank Rankans and then by the much ranker Stare-Eyes from oversea, rebels/patriots could not, after all, arrange such a meeting in some fine uptown place such as the Golden Oasis or Hari's Spot or even the Golden Lizard.

The two had been waiting quite a while and already one knife-fight had played absolute havoc with a winejar, two mugs, an i

"Wish that little son-of-a-bitch would hurry up and get here," one said; his name was Zip and he had eyes that would look better on the other side of iron bars.

The other young man frowned, glancing distastefully at the mug on the table before him. "No call to say that-you don't even know who his mother is."

"Neither did his father, Jes."

Jes tried not to smile at that one, and shrugged. "Fine. Call him a bastard, then, and leave slurs to womanhood out of it."

"Lord, but you're sensitive."

"True."

Zip didn't say anything about the reflection on womanhood implicit in the very existence of bastard offspring, because he didn't think of it. His mind was not given to the formulation of such retorts, or much cleverness. He was a rebel and a fighter, not a thinker. On the other hand, he was the very hell of a patriot and rebel. His name was Zip and he had always thought quite a bit of a certain spawn of the shadows and tried to emulate him, until lately. Now he had lost respect for that one, but needed him.

"That's him," Zip said. "A bastard. Both by birth and by nature."

This time Jes went ahead and smiled. "That's pretty good. Zip. Oh-the barkeep's staring at us again." Jes's name was really Kama, and she was nothing at all like Zip except that tonight, like Zip, she was in disguise. Yet she had made one of those astonishing discoveries that come all unsuspected on unsuspecting people who might wish for better: she liked Zip, and she liked him more than somewhat.

"Oh, no. If I have to order another of those rotten cat-urine beers, I'll-ah. Here comes the son of a-the bast- here he comes now," he said, gazing past her. She didn't have to turn much to see the doorway; they had got themselves seated so as to be able to note who came in without seeming to show interest.

A step above the room, the doorway of Sly's Place was graced by thirty-one strands of dangling Syrese rope, each knotted thirty-one times in accord with that superstition. They hung just short of the oiled wooden flooring. Through that unlikely arras had just come a narrow lean wraith of a youthful man of average height, above-average presence, and a weening cockiness that showed in face and stance and carriage. Several years younger than Zip he was, and dressed all in black except for the (very) scarlet sash. His hair was blacker than black and seemed trying to decide whether to curl above almost-black eyes to make a person step aside while his own hair tried to curl. The falcate nose belonged on a young eagle. Good shoulders on him, and no hips worth mentioning.

His wearing of weapons was overdone the way a courtesan overdid her gems: as advertisement and braggadocio. Over the sash he wore a shagreen belt; from it a curved dagger swung at his left hip and an Ilbarsi knife, its blade twenty inches long or worse, on the right. The copper-set leather armlet that encircled his right upper arm was more than decoration: it housed a hiltless, guardless, long black lozenge of a throwing knife. So did the long bracer of black leather on that arm. More than one patron of Sly's Place knew that the decoration on his left buskin was the hilt of a knife sheathed within that soft boot. (They were wrong; he'd moved that sticker to the other buskin, and it didn't show.) Maybe he wore other blades and maybe he did not; there were rumors.

From beneath raven's-wing brows he surveyed the place as if he owned it and yet despised it and might turn it into a pet shop or fishmonger's tomorrow morning early. (He didn't own it.) He did own the imperiously Imperial Rankan eagle off the roof of Barracks Three, because he had stolen it for a lark and to use as a pissoir; and for a time he had owned the Savankh, too: the wand of Imperial office and authority of the Rankan governor, which he had stolen from within the very palace (which everyone knew was impossible of clandestine access) and ransomed it back to its rightful possessor, a nice well-meaning blond of about his age.