Shadowspawn (Thieves' World Book 4) Read online

  Mignureal bit her lip until it hurt.

  “Anyhow, I got used to no one’s even noticing me, so I got close to this one stall and spent a long time easing my hand up there. All quivery and holding my breath. And I touched a fig, and snatched it. It looked huge, and good, and it felt huge in my hand and pulpy and — real good. But then I had to run from the monster.”

  Swallowing hard, blinking hard, she got out, “The…monster…”

  “Oh, it was a man, of course. I know that now. Not then! Then he was a monster, about nineteen feet tall, and he was chasing me and I thought he’d eat me because I had taken a fig to eat, off his counter. Except that I think it wasn’t even his stall or his counter.”

  Mignureal swallowed hard and felt her eyes blur again.

  He was staring ahead at nothing, but this was different: she felt that even had there been something up there to stare at, Hanse wouldn’t have seen it. Not right now.

  “I remember it all exactly. Want to know what he was wearing?”

  “Hanse…”He voice was tiny. She heard its tremor, but apparently Hanse did not. Hanse wasn’t even here anymore, not here and now.

  “He had a big black beard under a big reddish nose and huge feet in sort of yellow sandals — it was late spring or early summer, I’m sure, because I didn’t have much on but I wasn’t cold and besides there were fruits in the market. He had big hairy calfy legs coming down out of a tunic the colour of cooked squash. And his hands were the size of hams. Huge hairy hamsized hands, after me, reaching for me with fingers like cucumbers. I ran, and I banged into people’s legs and bounced off and just ran on in whatever direction that faced me. He kept coming, and shouting. A fig! Just a fig, that was all.

  “Anyhow I ran into the comer of someone else’s counter, another vendor’s, and that knocked the fig out of my hand. I never even got it, and he didn’t even want it! He probably didn’t even want me! The big bully just enjoyed scaring the little lost boy.”

  Or maybe catch him and s-sell him, Mignureal thought, swallowing and wishing this weren’t happening. Even his voice had changed. He was almost that little boy again, running from the monster and scared enough to wet himself.

  “Either that or hoping to catch me and sell me!” Hanse said, echoing her thoughts so that she jerked her head to look over at him in surprise. “I’ve thought of that since! Anyhow I ducked around that stall, and around back it was just a tent. Faded old green and brown stripes, going up and down. I dived under it into the dark and didn’t move for about three days.”

  “Hanse — ”

  “Oh I know it only seemed three days,” he said, misunderstanding her reason for saying his name in that low but rushing voice. “It might have been an hour. I was scared. Real scared. I could feel my heart and hear it, along with my blood pounding and rushing. I guess probably about an hour passed with me too scared to move. I knew that at any minute any moment any second he was going to rip up the tent and there I’d be, all in the bright light lying there helpless as a lizard without legs, and he’d Get me.

  “He didn’t. That bully probably forgot all about me two minutes after I ran around the comer of that stall-tent and he didn’t see me anymore. So after a long time I noticed what I’d been smelling. I didn’t smell it for a long time. All I did was try to listen but hearing only my heart and my blood gushing through my head. Then I noticed the smell, the odour; and then I saw it.”

  Silently weeping and wishing she could be holding him in her arms, Mignureal was trying to steer her horse closer to his so that at least their legs would rub, when he surprised her still again.

  “Then I saw it,” he said again, and he actually chuckled. “It was a little yellow bowl, a mined one with a crooked lip. Had a dark stripe running around it, wavery, but it was dark there so I couldn’t make out the colour. The bowl had food in it! A feast had been waiting right there for me, all that time! A few inches from my nose, and me too scared to see it or smell it!”

  Mignureal watched him shake his head, the white cloth rumpling and creasing with the movement. The hood concealed his face, except for part of his nose.

  “I feasted,” he said. “I feasted! Took at least two seconds to gobble it all. Maybe three. Then I wiggled out from under the tent and went…went away. Back to the market, back into that forest of legs. About a minute later a short really skinny woman with a face like a dried date called me.

  “‘Hey, boy,’ she said. ‘Hey.’

  “I thought how ugly she was and I knew she was going to grab me for stealing a fig and then eating someone else’s feast, and I started to run but banged right into a fat woman in long, long skirts. Skirts in about sixteen colours — a S’danzo, of course. I bounced off right into the other woman’s hand. She was leaning over her counter, out of her stall. Her hand had a wonderful little currant cakey in it. That’s why she was calling me; she was offering the waif a sweetie! I gulped it and then I remembered how I’d thought she was a monster or a witch, after me, but how nice she was. That made me feel bad, and I started to cry. I ran. I never even thanked her. I think I learned what embarrassment is, that day. Among other things.” They rode in silence for a long minute or more. The sun was low in a sky going ever redder but still no less hot. The horses plodded, with Hanse far away in his thoughts. Mignureal was unable to speak and working hard to keep her sobbing from his ears.

  “That’s my first memory, Mignue. Being hungry and alone, real hungry, and just taking a fig, one little fig. Then getting chased that way. I’ve never been so terrified. Absolutely terrified. Then finding food, and then that woman. Ugly and mean-looking because of the lines in her face — probably old smile-lines — but the kindest person I had ever met. Up until then.” He shook his head at the memory, at the irony.

  “And my feast, Mignue; you know what that feast was, in that little mis-made yellow bowl with the dark stripe?”

  He snorted a laugh that was not real. “That bowl was scraps! You know, table scraps. Some peelings, the end of a cucumber, some crumbs and actually a little piece of bread. A real little piece, with the smell of meat on it. I devoured part of a dog’s dinner out of a dog’s bowl, that was my feast!” Quivering, Mignureal pretended to reach down to her foot on the side opposite Hanse, so that she could brush away tears. She straightened slowly, now pretending to be rubbing Inja’s neck in the extremely warm place under its mane.

  After another while of silent plodding Hanse said, “The other kindest person I ever met was just the opposite. Head like a melon, face like a moon, belly like a barrel and — just big all over. And with a nice expression all over her face, all the time, all her life.”

  “My…my mother.”

  He nodded. “Now you know how much I care about how someone looks, Mignue. I learned early about how important a person’s looks are! Cudget was…Cudget was ugly, and I’ve got a nose on me like a hungry hawk. That’s what somebody said once; I’d been thinking it looked like a buzzard beak. What in several hells I am doing riding across the desert alone with a girl who’s absolutely beautiful — that’s a mystery and a miracle.”

  He looked at her then, and smiled, and despite all her intentions and her fighting against it, Mignureal performed that ancient cliché of bursting into tears.

  “Oh no!” Hanse said in horror. She knows her tears are like a needle in my gut — but it’s not her fault. Why’d I have to go and mention Moonflower?

  *

  Strange, how rapidly sunset came on the desert, especially to two who had lived their lives in a town on the seacoast. The sky went more and more orange, and then the sun, usually a white glare, became an enormous red ball squatting on the edge of the desert. Swiftly it died there, all bloody on the horizon. As swiftly the brilliantly starlit darkness unfurled across the plain of sand, purpling it.

  Hanse might have been an old man on dismounting, from the way he groaned and grunted and complained.

  “Ah!” he began anew, when he took his first step away from Blackie. “Ahr!
Gods of my fathers, the thighs! What straddling a horse does to my thighs!”

  Mignureal smiled. “I know, mine too. But that’s not what you’re rubbing, darling!”

  “And you’re not! Hmp. The gods better equipped you females for sitting a saddle,” he grumbled. “You’re practically designed for it! Your thighs are farther apart to begin with. Besides, you women have more padding — I mean, you’re different from us in the rear, too.”

  Her smile widened. “Haven’t I just noticed that!”

  Hanse was forced to chuckle and go to hug her — hobbling, walking bandy-legged. They embraced until he was swallowing, wanting her out of all these clothes, wanting his hands all over her, wanting to throw her down And. He broke the embrace and, working his shoulders and still wincing when he moved his legs, got out of the long hooded robe.

  “Arrgh! If the gods had intended men to ride horses, they’d have…I don’t know. They just didn’t intend for us to, that’s all!”

  “Try to think how much sorer you’d be if we had walked all this way.”

  He scowled at her. “Oh stop being so damned cheerful and practical! When I want to complain, I want to complain. It’s a sacred right.”

  “Aye, milord priest,” she smiled, also shucking her robe.

  Both of them were happy to get out of the voluminous garments, white because they gathered no sun (and indeed reflected it, according to the drover, who certainly qualified as expert as to the desert).

  Hanse’s faded old russet tunic had three-quarter sleeves and thong laces at the V of the neck, over leather leggings of dark tan, and a pair of good soft boots. He wore his knives, of course, though the big Ilbarsi “knife,” long as Mignureal’s arm, he had slung from his saddle. He looked neither scungy nor wealthy, which was the way he wanted to look. Mignureal also appeared neither, but she was hardly to be overlooked. She was of the S’danzo, and she was Moonflower’s daughter. The bulk of her clothing made her look as if she might weigh two hundred pounds. She did not.

  Three of her mother’s inordinate number of rings she wore now, if not quite as many colours and patterns of clothing. Perhaps only eleven, including paisley and stripes and the blue and green scarf that tied back her hair, which was deep, true blue-black and had been cut once, at twelve, as part of her puberty rites. She wore singlet and blouse and vest, three skirts and two aprons. Strangely, one of the skirts matched the headband. Hanse had noted that. He had thought of a clever remark about her going conservative but was saving it for a more propitious time. A better one, anyhow.

  “How can you stand all those clothes?”

  Mignureal shrugged, and her colour deepened a bit.

  They had stopped for the night at a spot of green. A small well, stone-protected and bearing a sign, managed to support a few yards of scrubby grass and two and a half imitation trees. Mignureal read the sign aloud: it advised them not to drop anything into the water but to be sure to leave for others the droppings of their animals, well away from the well.

  “Ickh,” Mignureal said, making a face. “Whatever for? And why the sign? It isn’t as if we’d be taking our horse droppings with us!”

  Hanse chuckled. “You’ve never been poor,” he said.

  She wheeled on him, showing that unaccountable offense so many people took at any intimation that they lived comfortably.

  “You think we were rich? There were nine of us!”

  “No, I mean you weren’t poor enough. Not really poor, not dirt poor; not goat-chip poor. I learned about that, early enough. Goat turds are best and I hear camel drops are better. But any manure is a good fuel, once it’s been allowed to age and dry a bit. It burns, and it burns slowly. Downwind is full of people who can’t afford so much as a stick of wood even for their cookstoves, Mignue.”

  She put her hands together, not quite clapping them. “Oh. I guess you know a lot of things I don’t.”

  “About being poor, yes,” he said, moving about the tiny excuse for an oasis, looking for a trove of droppings from previous stoppers here.

  “I love you, Hanse,” she murmured, and luxuriated in just watching him. Watching him move. It was coming on for night, and night was Hanse’s time. He moved best by night.

  The streets are my home, he had once told another, wiser woman of some sophistication, who as it turned out was sophisticated enough to be using him. They birthed me and gave me suck. He was less cocky with Mignureal, because he needn’t be: he was more comfortable with her, and could almost be himself. That was not easy for Hanse called Shadowspawn, the thief of Sanctuary called Thieves’ World.

  Very still beside the well, Mignureal watched him walk, watched him move. She had done so, as unobtrusively as possible, for years. She loved watching him move. So wiry and lithe, so smooth in the way he seemed just to glide, hardly touching foot to ground.

  “Hanse walks like a hungry cat,” some said back in Sanctuary, and might even shiver a bit. Actually he didn’t; Hanse glided. His buskins’ soft soles lifted only a finger’s breadth with each step. They came down on the balls of the feet, not the heels. Some made fun of that (though only when Shadowspawn was elsewhere), because it made for a sinuous glide that was strange in appearance. The better-born watched him with an aesthetic fascination — and some horripilation. Among females highborn or otherwise and including Mignureal, the fascination was often layered with interest, however unwilling. She had never thought or said what others said, predictably: a distasteful, rather sexy animal that Hanse; that Shadowspawn.

  Mignureal was watching him now, and so raptly that she jerked when he spoke.

  “Hmm. Well, it’s this way, m’dear,” he said, gliding back her way. “Either someone ignored the sign or others have been here recently and used all the fuel supply. We’ll not be having a fire. Better break out the dates and hardcrust and that awful saltwater-dried fish. I’ll get some beer off Dumb-ass. Oh wait; let’s give him the first drink out of that well, Mignue.”

  Drawing up a sloshy bucket, wood banded in rope, she looked at him. “Why?”

  He paused to meet her gaze. “Just in case. He’s the least important of the five of us.”

  “Oh!” She shivered. She looked into the bucket with new scepticism, then back at Hanse. “But he’s carrying all our supplies!”

  He nodded. “A lot of which could go on our horses. And I’d hate to have to ride that dumb donkey. Guiding him by his ears, I guess. That leaves you and me.” He showed her a sweet look and spread his hands. “But if you drank first and something’s wrong with that water, who’d I snuggle up to when it gets chilly?”

  “Oh — you!” she said, smiling. And she broke out the copper pan the ass wore. The leathern bag beside it jingled just beautifully. She gave their pack animal his drink. “It’s already chilly, by the way. I’ll bet Cutie here would be just lovely and warm to snuggle up to, too!”

  “Eeeee-Awwwww!” Hanse called, unshipping the carefully balanced and pleasantly sloshy goatskin bags from the onager even while he imitated him. The animal’s big pearl-tipped ears shifted back, but he didn’t deign to look around.

  She was right. The world had already become positively chilly, and they both knew without being able to understand the phenomenon that soon it would be worse than chilly.

  Hanse hadn’t yet noticed. First giving the jingly sack a fond pat, he opened the sloshy one to decant some beer. The wet cloth wrapped around the bag had long since dried completely, and its cooling effect had long since left the beer. Hanse didn’t mind.

  “Ahhhhh.”

  “How is it, Hanse?”

  “Warm.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  With a little smile at her lack of knowledge due to inexperience, he shrugged and drank again. “Ahhh. It could be less hot. Today I was afraid of using the water just to cool the beer. Tomorrow we’ll do that, and remember to re-wet the cloth from time to time. We can use the same cloth to wipe our faces.”

  “That will be nice, Hanse,” she said thoughtfully, �
��suppose you made sure the sack was tightly stoppered, and we tied it real tight and lowered it into the well. That should bring the temperature down some, shouldn’t it?”

  Above the beer-sack, Hanse’s eyes went large and round. Slowly he lowered the bag, and slowly he turned his head to look, all large-eyed, at Mignureal. “Remind me sometime to tell you why I wouldn’t dream of putting any kind of bag down a well.”

  She looked at him for a moment before her laugh bubbled out.

  “Oh! You have, you have!” With a little pouncing movement that swished her skirts, she patted the bag that jingled rather than sloshed. Its leather was seamed with cracks. “How long did you tell me all this silver coin was down that well up at Eaglenest?”

  “Years,” Hanse sighed, and drank.

  *

  “Shadowspawn schemes to steal from the very Prince-Governor,” a certain lowlife had some years before told the night proprietor of the Golden Lizard, who had told Gelicia, proprietor of a popular house-not-home in Sanctuary. “And to make a quick large profit in the doing.”

  Gelicia had transmitted that information to one Cusharlain, who had been conducting a secret investigation of Hanse called Shadowspawn on behalf of a Certain Party High In The Government. (One of the Prince-Governor’s concubines, actually, who also happened to be playing around with one of the Prince-Governor’s personal bodyguard, the Hell-Hounds, and had schemes of her own.)

  Cusharlain had shown his incredulity. “This young gamecock means to try to rob the very palace?”

  “Don’t scoff, Cusher,” Gelicia said, waving a doughy hand well leavened with rings. “If it can be done, Shadowspawn’ll do it. Did you hear about the ring he roached from under the pillow of Corlas the camel dealer — while Corlas’ head was on it, sleeping? Ever hear tell of how our boy Hanse dumb up and stole the eagle off the roof of Barracks Three for a lark? Had a prodigal offer from some richie up in Twand, he did; and do you know Hanse wouldn’t take it? Said he liked having the thing. Pisses on it every morning on rising, he says.”