The face of chaos - Thieves World 05 (26 page)

Then the second Beysib trooper stumbled over the cask and banged his own lamp down into the naphtha. The tunnel boomed into red life. It singed Samlor's eyebrows, even though Lord Tud-haliya shielded the Cirdonian from the worst of it.

The Beysib noble pitched forward. Samlor ran for the boat, clutching the child now in both arms. The capering fire threw their shadows down the tunnel ahead of them.

Samlor set Star in the stern of the punt and began shoving the vessel back towards the water. The sea had retreated since he dragged the punt out of it. While Samlor thrust at the boat, he glanced back over his shoulder. The blazing petroleum was creeping down the slope of the tunnel. Just ahead of it, his clothes afire but a sword gripped still in either hand, came Lord Tudhaliya. The swordsman's hair and flesh stank as they burned, but there are men whom no degree of pain will turn from a task. Samlor recognized the mind-set very well. The Cirdonian still had a push dagger sheathed on his left wrist, but it was as useless against this opponent as the knives he had left in bodies cooling on the temple floor. Samlor snatched up the punt pole, sliding it forward in his grip. As Tudhaliya feinted with his left sword, Samlor thrust the pole into the centre of the Beysib's chest. With enough room to manoeuvre, Tudhaliya would have avoided the clumsy attack. Instead, his sluggish reflexes bounced him against the tunnel wall, and the end of the pole knocked him back into the spreading flames.

The Beysib stood up. Samlor poked at his groin, missed, but caught his opponent in the ribs with enough force to topple him again. Tudhaliya's swords snicked from either side, inches short of where Samlor gripped the pole. Chips flew, but the pole was seasoned ash and as thick as a man's wrist. Samlor thrust himself away, and the Beysib recoiled on to his back in the fire. The naphtha sucked a fierce breeze from the tunnel to feed its flames. The glare flickered now around Tudhaliya's face, as instinct forced him to breathe. There was no help in that influx, only red tendrils that shrank lung tissues and blazed back out of Tudhaliya's mouth as he finally screamed.

'My sweet, my love,' Samlor whispered as he turned back to the girl. 'I'm going to take you home, now.' The punt's flat bottom jounced easily over the stone as if the executioner's death had doubled the rescuer's strength.

'Are you taking me back to Mama Reia?' Star asked. She had watched Tudhaliya die with great eyes, which she now focused on Samlor. The man splashed beside the boat for a few paces while the shingle foamed. Then he hopped aboard and thrust outwards for the length of the pole. Since the tide had turned, there was no longer need to fend off from the corniche. When they were thirty feet out, the Cirdonian set down the pole and worried loose the lashings of his oars with his spike-bladed push dagger. 'Star,' he said, now that he had leisure for an answer, 'Maybe we'll send for Reia. But we're going back to your real home - Cirdon. Do you remember Cirdon?' Inexpertly, the caravan-master began to fit the looms through the rope bights that served the punt for oarlocks.

Star nodded with solemn enthusiasm. She said, 'Are you really my uncle?'

Poling had raised and burst blisters on both Samlor's hands. The salt-crusted oar handles ground like acid-tipped glass as he began the unfamiliar task of rowing. 'Yes,' he said. 'I promised your mother - your real mother. Star, my sister ... I promised her -' and this was true, though Samlane was two years dead when her brother shouted the words to the sky - 'that I'd take care of oh. Oh, Mother Heqt. Oh, to have brought us so close.'

Lord Tudhaliya had not trusted his men on the shore to sweep up the cultists. Someone in the boat Tudhaliya had stationed off the headland had seen the man and child. The Beysib craft was a ten-oared cutter. It began to close the distance from the first strokes that roiled the phosphorescence and brought the cutter to Samlor's attention.

An archer stood upright in the cutter's bow. His first shot was' wobbly and short by fifty of the two hundred yards. He nocked another shaft, and the cutter pulled closer.

Samlor dropped his oars. He knelt and raised his hands. He did not trust his balance to standing up. 'Star,' he said, 'I'm afraid that these men have caught us after all. If I try to get away, something bad may happen to you by accident. And I can't fight them, I don't have any way to fight so many.'

Star peered over her shoulder at the Beysib cutter, then turned back to Samlor.

'I don't want to go with them. Uncle,' she said pettishly. 'I want to go back to Cirdon. I want to play in the big house.'

'Honey,' Samlor said, 'sweetest ... I'm sorry. But we can't do that now, because of that boat.' The cutter was too big to overturn, the caravan-master was thinking. But perhaps if he jumped into the larger boat with his push dagger, in the confusion they might The Beysib archer pitched into the water. It was a moment before Samlor realized that the man had fallen forward because the cutter had come to an abrupt halt beneath him. The swift craft had thrown up a bone of glowing spray. Now the spray's remnant curled forward and away from the cutwater as a diminishing furrow on the sea.

'Now can we go to Cirdon, Uncle?' the little girl asked. She lowered the hands she had turned towards the cutter. Either her voice had dropped an octave, or the caravan-master's mind was freezing down in sudden terror. The white tendrils of Star's hair blazed and seemed to writhe.

The cutter's bow lifted. The boat disappeared stern-first with a rush and a roar and the screams of her crew. A huge, sucker-blotched tentacle uncoiled a hundred feet skyward, then plunged back into the glowing sea. Samlor's hands found the oars again. His mind was ice, and his muscles moved like flows of ice. 'Yes, Star,' he heard his voice say. 'We can go back to Cirdon now.'

Diana L. Paxson

The big mirror glimmered balefully from the wall, challenging him. Even from across the room, Lalo could see himself reflected - a short man with thinning, gingery hair, tending to put on weight around the middle though his legs were thin; a man with haunted eyes and stubby, paint-stained hands. But it was not his reflection empty-handed that frightened him. The thing he feared was his own image copied on to a canvas, if he should dare to face the mirror with paintbrush in hand.

A shout from the street startled him and he went softly to the window, but'it was only someone chasing a cutpurse who had mistaken their cul-de-sac for a shortcut between Slippery Street and the Bazaar. The strangeness of life in Sanctuary since the Beysib invasion, or infestation, or whatever it should be called, gave simple theft an almost nostalgic charm. Lalo gazed out over the jumble of roofs to the blue shimmer of the harbour and an occasional flash where the sun caught the gilding on a Beysib mast. Ils knew the Beysib were colourful enough, with their embroidered velvets and jewels that put a sparkle in even Prince Kitty-Cat's eye, but Lalo had not been asked to paint any of them so far. Or to paint anything else, for that matter - not for some time now. Until the good folk of Sanctuary figured out how to transfer some of their new neighbours' wealth into their own coffers, no one was going to have either the resources or the desire to hire Sanctuary's only notable native artist to paint new decorations in their halls. Lalo wondered if Enas Yorl's gift to him would work on a Beysib. Did the fish-eyes have souls to be revealed?

Without willing it, Lalo found himself turning towards the mirror again.

'Lalo!'

Gilla's voice broke the enchantment. She filled the doorway, frowning at him, and he flushed guiltily. His preoccupation with the mirror bothered her, but she would have been more than bothered if she had known why it fascinated him so.

'I'm going shopping,' she said abruptly. 'Anything you want me to get for you?'

He shook his head. 'Am I supposed to be watching the baby while you're gone?'

Alfi thrust past her flowing skirts and looked up at his father with bright eyes.

'I'm t'ree years old!' said Alfi. 'I a big boy now!'

Lalo laughed suddenly and bent to ruffle the mop of fair curls. 'Of course you are.'

Gilla towered above him like the statue of Shipri All-Mother in the old temple.

'I'll take him with me,' she said. 'The streets have been quiet lately, and he needs the exercise.'

Lalo nodded and, as he straightened, Gilla touched his cheek, and he understood what she could so rarely manage to put into words, and smiled.

'Don't let the fish-eyes gobble you up!' he replied. Gilla snorted. 'In broad daylight? I'd like to see them try! Besides, our Vanda says they're only people like ourselves, for all their funny looks, and serving that Lady Kurrekai, she should know. Will you trust Bazaar tales or your own daughter's word?' She backed out of the doorway, hoisted the child on to one broad haunch, and scooped up the market basket. The building shook beneath Gilla's heavy tread as she went down the stairs, and Lalo moved back to the window to see her down the street. The hot sunlight gilded her fading hair until it was as bright as the child's. Then she was gone, and he was alone with the mirror and his fear. A man called Zanderei had asked Lalo if he had ever painted a self-portrait whether he had ever dared to find out if the gift the sorcerer Enas Yorl had given him of painting the truth of a man would enable him to make a portrait of his own soul. In return, Lalo had given Zanderei his life, and at first he had been so glad to be alive himself that he did not worry about Zanderei's words. Then the Beysib fleet had appeared on the horizon, with the sun striking flame from their mastheads and their carven prows, and no one had had leisure to worry about anything else for awhile. But now things were quiet and Lalo had no commissions to occupy him, and he could not keep his eyes from the mirror that hung on the wall.

Lalo heard a dog barking furiously in the street and two women squabbling in the courtyard below and, more faintly, the perpetual hubbub of the Bazaar; but here it was very still. A stretched canvas sat ready on his easel - he had been planning to spend this morning blocking out a scene of the marriage of Ils and Shipri. But there was no one else in the house now - no one to peer through his doorway and ask what he thought he was doing - no one to see. Like a sleepwalker, Lalo lifted the easel to one side of the mirror, positioned himself so that the light from the window fell full on his face, and picked up the paintbrush.

Then, like a lover losing himself for the first time in the body of his beloved, or an outmatched swordsman opening his guard to his enemy's final blow, Lalo began to paint what he saw.

Gilla heaved the basket of groceries on to the table, rescued the sack of flour from the child's exploring fingers, and poured it into the bin, then found a wooden spoon for Alfi and set him down, where he began to bang it merrily against the floor. She stood for a moment, still a little out of breath from the stairs, then began to put her other purchases away. It did not take long. The influx of Beysib had strained Sanctuary's food supply, and their wealth had sent prices climbing, and though Gilla had hoarded a fair amount of silver, there was no telling how long it would be until Lalo was working regularly again. So it was back to rice and beans for the family, with an occasional fish in the stew. Now that so many new ships had been added to the local fleet, fish were the one item in ample supply. Gilla sighed. She had enjoyed their affluence - enjoyed putting meat on the table and experimenting with the spices imported from the north. But they had subsisted on coppers for more years than she liked to remember, and few enough of those. She was an expert on feeding a family on peas and promises. They would survive the Beysib as they had survived everything else. Alfi's short legs were carrying him determinedly towards the door to Lalo's studio. Gilla scooped him up and held him against her, still squirming, and kissed his plump cheek.

'No, love, not in there - Papa's working and we must leave him alone!'

But it was odd that Lalo had not at least called a welcome when he heard her come in. When he was painting a sitter, Vashanka could have blasted the house without his noticing, but there had been no commissions for some time, and when Lalo painted for pleasure he was usually glad for an excuse to break off for a cup of tea. She called to Latilla to take her little brother into the children's room to play, then coaxed a fire to life in the stove and put the kettle on. Lalo still had not stirred.

'Lalo, love - I've got water heating; d'you want a cup of tea?' She stood for a moment, hands on hips, frowning at the shut, unresponsive door; then she marched across the floor and opened it.

'You could at least answer me!' Gilla stopped. Lalo was not at his easel. For a moment she thought he must have decided to go out, yet the door had not been locked. But there was something different about the room. Lalo was standing by the far wall, for all the world like a piece of furniture. It took another moment for her to realize that he had not moved when she came in. He had not even looked at her.

Swiftly she went to him. He stood as if he had backed across the room step by careful step until he ran into the wall. The paintbrush was still clenched in one hand; she tugged it free and set it down. And still he did not move. His eyes were fixed, unseeing, on the easel across the room. She glanced at it - a man's face, and at this distance she saw nothing remarkable - then turned to him again.

'Lalo, are you all right? Did you hear me? Shipri All-Mother have mercy - Lalo, what's wrong?' She shook his arm and still he did not respond to her, and a sick fear uncoiled itself beneath her heart and began to grow. Gilla gathered him into her ample embrace and for a moment held him unresisting. His body was warm, and she could feel his heart beating very slowly against her own. but she knew with dreadful certainty that he was no longer there. Biting her lip, she guided him to the pallet and arranged him on it as one of the children might arrange a doll.