The guards at the Prince’s Gate hassled Cauvin each time he led the stoneyard’s mule cart between them, the same as they’d hassled him from the beginning. They hassled him by name now—

“Hey, Cauvin—what’ve you stolen this time—?”

“Stand aside, Cauvin, and let us take a look inside that cart—”

“Frog all, Cauvin, what’s the point in hauling rocks into Sanctuary—?”

He supposed recognition was an improvement, so long as he remained Cauvin, the sheep-shite stone-smasher from up on Pyrtanis Street with a reputation for brawling and, yes, raiding the old abandoned estates beyond the walls for stone that was a cut above any rock that could be dug out of the city’s ruins. Cauvin wasn’t the most common name in Sanctuary, but he had enough namesakes that someone could—might—wonder which Cauvin was which. His life—the life of a competent mason in a city built from mortared stone—would fall apart if lunkheaded puds from the guard ever got the idea that Cauvin the stone-smasher was the same Cauvin who’d turned up as one of Arizak’s more trusted advisors.

“You know how it is,” Cauvin said as he led the mule off the beaten path for inspection. “Some nabob wants to add a room, he doesn’t want to add it with common Sanctuary stone, he wants it out of matching stone from some dead nabob’s garden.”

The tallest of the guards pulled the canvas back, exposing an assortment of wedges, chisels, two mallets, and about a hundred-weight of fine-grained granite with most of its old mortar chipped away. He shoved a chunk or two, just enough to assure himself that there wasn’t something truly interesting underneath all that rock, then turned back to Cauvin with his hand discreetly cupped for a bribe.

“Can’t expect Wrigglie puds like you to earn an honest living.”

Cauvin shrugged off the insult. Never mind that he and the guard shared the same nasal dialect, same mongrel features—middling-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a thick hide that darkened like old leather in the summer sun—me guard made it clear that he fancied himself as a son of the Rankan Empire with a gods given right to lord it over lesser folk, which in Sanctuary meant Wrigglie folk, folk who didn’t always know who their parents had been, much less their grandparents.

Frog all, Ranke had pulled out of town nearly forty years ago and most of its thirty-eight Imperial cities were in worse shape than Sanctuary. The smart money—the nabobs’ money, whether they were swarthy Wrigglies or golden-haired Imperials—had shifted over to the Ilsigi Kingdom which, after a few centuries of inbreeding, had surprised itself and spawned a clever, ambitious king.

On the other hand, when it came to lording it over Sanctuary, nothing compared to a dyed-in-the-wool Ilsigi nobleman slumming in the city his ancestors’ runaway slaves had founded. Bad as “Wrigglie” sounded through an Imperial Rankan accent, it sounded that much worse in Kingdom tones.

“We Wrigglie puds do what we have to,” Cauvin replied, matching the guard’s inflection because he was a decent mimic and he hadn’t changed all that much from the brawler he’d been a scant year ago.

He dribbled four padpols—the going rate for common contraband—into the guard’s palm, then he clicked his tongue and the mule started for the gate. The guard muttered one of Sanctuary’s earthier epithets, but neither he nor his companions got in Cauvin’s way.

Once through the gate, the fastest way to his family’s stoneyard on Pyrtanis Street was through the ‘Tween and up the Stairs. The long way—the mule’s way—was down the Wideway to the Processional. Being a smart mule with a good memory, that was the way Flower intended to go. Cool water, fresh hay, and a patch of shade awaited her in the stoneyard. She had no interest in the ’Tween and no intention of plopping her hooves down on its tangled streets. When Cauvin signaled his intention to head toward the Stairs, Flower let loose with one of her attention-getting brays and rooted herself to the ground.

A lesser man—lesser in stubbornness and strength—might have given in to his mule’s wisdom, but not Cauvin. He gave Flower a shove in the shoulder that got her and the cart pointed in his chosen direction, then strode into the ’Tween ahead of her. She brayed a few times in protest before giving herself a mighty shake and following her wayward master.

Cauvin scratched Flower’s long ears when they were again within reach. He bought a melon from a dozing vendor and gave the larger half to his mule, earning her forgiveness. His own portion Cauvin held in his hand until they were deep in the tangle, then he righted a bashed-in barrel, propped it up between a shaded wall and a fence that was more hole than slat. With a nod to the mule, Cauvin settled in to savor his fruit, like any other workman stealing a few moments for himself.

The melon was sweetly delicious, but it could have crawled with maggots for all Cauvin noticed it. His attention was on a storefront squarely visible through the battered fence. The faded signboard above the open door proclaimed that the shop belonged to one Meerash who sold olive oil suitable for cooking and preserving. A pyramid of glass cruets and ceramic bottles filled the open window. From his vantage point behind the fence, Cauvin counted four spiderwebs connecting the pyramid to the window frame.

A halfway observant man could easily conclude Meerash wasn’t selling much oil this summer. A man with access to the officers of the watch and guard knew that Meerash wasn’t selling any oil because watchmen had fished his body, with a garotte still knotted around his neck, out of the harbor a month ago.

The knot had snagged someone’s curiosity. That someone had cut the cord without damaging it and passed the length to someone else, who’d passed it to someone else again and again until it wound up in Arizak’s hands.

This mean anything to you? the Irrune chieftain had asked, giving Cauvin a good look at the stiff, stained cord.

Arizak hadn’t been asking for Cauvin’s personal opinion. As far as the Irrune chieftain was concerned, Cauvin by himself was still a sheep-shite stone-smasher, but Cauvin had fallen heir to Molin Torchholder and been inexplicably engulfed by the memories of a lifetime not his own when that old pud had finally died. There wasn’t much about Sanctuary that the Torch didn’t have squirreled away in his memories. So, when Arizak turned to a stone-smasher for answers and advice, what he truly wanted was for Cauvin to immerse himself in a dead man’s past.

Cauvin had conquered the disorientation that accompanied an upswelling of another man’s memories. He froggin’ sure didn’t like it, but the process no longer nauseated him. The dead Torch’s memories were no help with the knot, though, which was a bit of a surprise, and a bit not. Molin Torchholder might have cleaned Dyareela’s minions out of Sanctuary, but he’d never known the bloody-hungry Hand of Chaos the way Cauvin, who’d grown up in their orphan pits, did.

Maybe, Cauvin had answered Arizak, hedging his bets. Let me do some checking around. I wouldn’t want to be wrong, he’d said, when the froggin’simple truth was he was afraid to be right.

Arizak had seen straight through Cauvin’s dodge. The man might be rotting away from the leg down, but his wits were sharp and he knew how to rule a people who didn’t want to be ruled by anything or anyone—which described Arizak’s own Irrune tribe as well as it described Sanctuary. The chief had told Cauvin to take his time, and said it with eyes that were heavy with warning.

Cauvin had backtracked the knot to Meerash’s shop. He’d kept his eye on the place for the last month, and he still wasn’t sure he had all the pieces in all the right places. Or, maybe, he just didn’t want to. When it came to spying, Cauvin was a froggin’ lubber. His inherited memories were no use: The Torch never dirtied his hands collecting scuttlebutt; he had a web of informants, a web that had slipped through Cauvin’s fingers months ago. Soldt, the one person Cauvin trusted with his own questions, had taken off two months ago on a commission to assassinate some Ilsigi, wizard. That left Cauvin with only his own wits for the job; and, shite for sure, he was the first to admit that his froggin’ wits weren’t the sharpest.

As best Cauvin could figure, the new owners of Meerash’s shop were selling protection and enforcing it with a gang of thugs, three of whom emerged onto the street as Cauvin watched. The trio were all of a type, the same type as Cauvin himself: brawny young men with big hands and thick skulls. He sized them up reflexively: He could take any one in a fair fight, any two with a stave from the barrel he was sitting on, but if all three took exception, he’d froggin’ have to run.

Cauvin glanced at the cart. Soldt had been giving him sword lessons for almost a year now, but he’d feel most comfortable with a steel-head mallet leaning against his thigh. He thought about retrieving it; that would mean leaving his spyhole. Maybe it was sheep-shite stupid to set himself up in a tight corner the way he was, but there could be no doubt that it would be doubly stupid to call attention to his froggin’ self rattling around in Flower’s cart, so Cauvin stayed put.

He kept his eye on the trio. Two of them bore a jagged tattoo, like sideways lightning or the oncoming profile of a hawk in flight, on their left forearms. The third probably had a similar tattoo, but his shirt was long-sleeved. Cauvin knew the tattoo as the mark of the Kintairs, an old ’Tweener gang he’d tangled with a few times before crossing paths with the Torch.

In those days the Kintairs—the name was a shortening of sikkintair, the dragons of Ils the Thunderer—had answered to Saluzi, a onetime sea captain and full-time troublemaker. Cauvin hadn’t seen Saluzi since he’d started spying on Meerash’s shop. If he’d had to guess, he’d say Saluzi had met the same fate as Meerash because, shite for sure, Saluzi hadn’t taken over Meerash’s little shop. Unlikely as snow in summer, the shop had been taken over by a woman and the Kintairs were taking their orders from her.

Her name was Cassata; at least that was the name she used here in the ‘Tween. Her dress was slovenly—draped and hitched around her until it was impossible to decipher the shape of the woman beneath. She wore a foreign sort of headdress with flaps that squared her face and fell across her shoulders like ragged, striped braids. The headdress covered all her hair except for a careless, mud-brown forelock. A bloody wen the size of a froggin’ walnut swelled on her jaw to complete her portrait. Beauty wasn’t everything, but women who looked like Cassata were more apt to beg for a living than give orders to thugs, leaving Cauvin to suspect that Cassata couldn’t possibly be the woman she seemed to be.

And then there was the knot …

Cauvin could have duplicated that knot with his eyes closed: When the Hand taught an orphan a lesson, even a sheep-shite stupid orphan learned it down to his froggin’ toenails and never forgot it, either. The Dyareelan priest who had taught Cauvin how to tie that knot was dead; Cauvin had watched the aptly named Strangle die. And all but a very, very few of the other orphans who’d learned that particular lesson were dead, too, but one of them …

Froggin’ gods, one of the surviving orphans had been Leorin and Leorin had been Cauvin’s wife for a few short hours last autumn, for the few hours it took to betray him to what remained of the Hand hiding out in the tunnels beneath Sanctuary.

Cauvin had escaped from the Hand a second time that night and Leorin had escaped the Irrune wrath he’d called down upon his captors. He’d hoped—because, though he couldn’t forgive his erstwhile wife, his heart still ached when he thought about her—that she’d have the sense to live her life far from Sanctuary. Far from him.

His wife had been beautiful—golden, curling hair, honey-hazel eyes, curves and grace—but she was about the same height as Cassata and had the same habit of twisting a bit of string between her fingers as she talked. The wisdom of his inherited memories said habits mattered more than appearances.

Appearances didn’t matter to the Hand—or, rather, appearance didn’t matter unless it was useful. A beautiful Leorin had been useful when no one knew who she worshipped. With that secret unmasked, beauty had become a liability—a beautiful Leorin could never have returned to Sanctuary.

The only questions worth asking were, Who had sent his wife back to Sanctuary? And why?

Cauvin had half a mind to walk right into the froggin’ shop and ask her. He hadn’t given in to that half … so far.

The trio concluded their business with Cassata and walked away from the shop, two headed off together and one headed toward Cauvin. He scooted silently over to the mule and had her walking when the Kintair thug came abreast of him. The two men gave each other the once-over and kept going.

Cauvin led Flower past Meerash’s shop. The mule was between him and the open door, and he was careful not to look into the shadows, but she’d see him—remember him—if she looked out, if she was Leorin … his wife. Cauvin told himself that he was, in his own way, warning Leorin—warning her that he knew who she was and that she needed to pack up and leave Sanctuary, this time for good.

The problem was, Leorin hadn’t gotten the message the last time Cauvin had led Flower past her shop, or the time before that; and Arizak wanted answers, results. Frog all, Cauvin didn’t want to stand in front of the Irrune chief and admit that he knew who had tied the knot around Meerash’s neck, where she was, and what she was to him. He didn’t want to say anything to anyone until he could say that Leorin was gone.

The mule and Cauvin rounded a corner and headed back to the Wideway. With each step Cauvin cursed the luck that had brought Leorin back to Sanctuary while the one man he trusted completely was out hunting wizards. Frog all, he cursed the luck that had left him with a dead man’s memories, but not the wit to use them; and the sheep-shite luck that had brought him to birth in Sanctuary in the first place.

“Sail ho!” the cry was, and Capt. Jarez Camargen of the Widowmaker climbed to the masthead himself with his best glass, sweeping the dawn sea.

A day and night of treacherous shifts and tricks, and now, with the wind off the starboard quarter, the Widowmaker’s best sailing point, there she was, their chase, the Yenized ship Fortunate, sail above the horizon.

“Ho, Cap’n!” came from his lieutenant, below. “No longer quite as Fortunate, eh?”

Camargen grinned, a wicked and wolfish sort of grin. Widowmaker was, to put it in the very best light, a pirate. Her prey had run her every trick in a thick old book, and here they were again, out of the isles and onto the southern coast.

They were a Yenized polacre xebec themselves, the Widowmaker —at least Yenized-built, before they’d taken her in the Isles. Capt. Camargen had liked the look of her: long, low-waisted, a pretty set to her lateen sails fore and aft, her bastard mizzen, which gave her power, and quick, oh, much better in his able hands than in the hands of the fool that had left her largely unmanned and anchored off Keina’s Head. Her former captain had been taking on water on that island when they’d seen black smoke billowing up from the harbor and their sweet xebec standing out to sea under all sail. The Happy Isle, she’d been, under a fool; but Widowmaker she’d become, and she had a nose for treasure—had a sure, keen nose, these days, wizard-guided, since they’d met up with old Hada Korgun and his grievance, and used him for a weathervane.

There he was, out under the bowsprit, incorruptible, as good a guide as a pirate’s instinct to the whereabouts of the Fortunate. They didn’t check him often, but he was there, arm outstretched, glassy eyes open, mouth still stretched wide with his dying curse, and where he pointed, there they sailed.

There was a Yenizedi wizard on board the Fortunate, likely in better shape. And they’d tried the soft approach—used Widowmaker’s Yenized-built outlines and her old Yenizedi flag to get close to the Fortunate the first time, but that trick would never work twice. Hada Korgun had laid his curse, burst his heart doing it, and now forget all the old bastard had said about duty to the king of Enlibar and the pardon they’d get if they only got his treasure back. A dead wizard didn’t keep promises any better than a live king, and Camargen never had liked that part of the bargain.

The Fortunate carried a number of items along with a scoundrel of a Yenized wizard, a man after Camargen’s own heart, who’d stolen this treasure from Hada Korgun by an act of hospitality betrayed … clever man, who had a very well-known ruby, the Heart of Fire, along with a book of spells and a gold-headed wand.

The Enlibrite, Hada Korgun, had lost his court job over that theft, the ruby being the property of the king of Enlibar. He desperately wanted his king’s property back, along with the head of the offender, that being the condition of his reinstatement. He’d approached them in the free port of Anbec, offered them considerable inducement to pursue the fugitive—for starters—and claimed the magical ability to track this prize.

All this was useful until they had the ship in sight and Korgun tried some rite or another attempting to link the two ships. He died in the magical backlash—died, or something like it. The crew had lashed him to the mast and kept him there four days, in the hopes he’d come around and blast the ship that now ran them a merry chase. His arm moved. Where that ship went, when it tacked or wore, it tracked, no matter the weather. But he’d begun to have an effect on the crew, just standing there in the way of hands on business, and it seemed less and less likely he’d come to and be himself again.

So they’d lashed him under the bowsprit, down where hands bound for the head could look out and wish him a good day, if they wanted. At night he had a wan kind of bluish glow about him, and for his part, Capt. Camargen would just as soon cut him free for fish bait, being averse to wizardry from the start and convinced by a long shot he didn’t need a wizard-compass to run down a bloody great Yenizeder merchantman in the middle of the ocean.

But the captain of that vessel was a right seaman, no question. They’d used all their tricks on each other, setting out decoys at night, muffling up their wizard-compass with sailcloth and dousing all lights to creep closer on a following breeze. They’d gotten the most of every wind that would serve, crept through a maze of islands and chartless reefs, turned tricks of light and weather, and all he’d done had kept the bastard from any civilized port, at least. Run as he would, every time he came close to land, he’d gotten between and chased him out to sea.

They’d be rich. The law of the Brotherhood was share and share alike, and they’d be rich when they ran that beggar down.

So the crew put up with misery, put up with a chase that dragged into days and weeks, into calms and blows and heat and frozen, deadly rigging. The deep calms had set them in sight of one another, the weed growing thick on both their bottoms, until they both sailed like slugs, and no time for either of them to heave down and scrape clean. The chase took on a nightmare slowness at times, every scrap of sail aloft and the log running slower, slower, while they blazed away at one another with Yenized Fire, and flung glass bombs, trying to set sails or pitch-soaked wood ablaze. Crew were scarred with burns, to a man.

Then they reached latitudes where storms grew deadly icicles in the maintop, that plunged to deck and dented the planks, where men took horrible falls, and thus far survived them. “’Cause he’s dead, we ain’t,” was the common wisdom, and the crew didn’t want to look at their wizard—all frozen up with icicles, one report said, but still moving—but they had acquired a superstitious belief that old Korgun was their luck as well as their compass.

A sensible captain might have called it enough. Widowmaker’s situation had gotten desperate, running them low on provisions and on water, the bitter latitudes wearing the already thin sails and rigging to a perilous state. At times they thought they’d have lost their quarry, and Captain Camargen began to think of ordering the Widowmaker to some wooded shore, some foreign port where they might forget the foolishness and get it out of their blood.

But there was that damned wizard-compass up under the bow, their figurehead. And just when they thought they’d lost her, there was the thrice-damned Fortunate. At times a glass showed her clearly, let them see that cursed Yenizedi wizard walking around, talking to the crew, sometimes just lingering back by the stern and watching them, just watching, silver hair streaming in the wind—a live wizard, to their dead one.

“We can find other prey,” Capt. Camargen had said. Even he had a conscience, and when water itself ran short, when they could take no time to send boats ashore: “We’re down to a ton of water,” he told the assembled crew, “and even the hardtack is running slim.”

“We ain’t et all the rats, yet,” the crew shouted back. “We’re goin’ on, Cap’n!”

The log itself had gone strange. What Capt. Camargen thought he’d written turned out written differently when he checked his course. His charts showed frayed and lost lettering just where it might have been most useful.

But now they were closer than they had been in weeks. The Fortunate was hull-up, and lagging, the wind deserting her sails as she bore close to a shore where the charts warned of reefs and shoals, another of her tricks, but not one she could play to great advantage: The Widowmaker could skin through channels where the Fortunate risked her bottom, and a xebec’s sails gave her much more maneuverability in the tricks of wind.

Around a headland, skimming close, close to shore, and now there seemed to be a spot on the lens. Capt. Camargen closed the glass, polished the lens with his cuff, and tried again.

Not a spot, after all. A spot of bluish haze, the sort of color that ought to belong on the horizon, but that had set down on the sea, right near that coast, and the sea beyond it all wrinkled with wind.

Camargen snapped the glass shut and glared, not needing a glass now to see that situation, the dog.

They had the wind off their starboard quarter, carrying them along at a good rate, no danger of a lee shore while this wind blew, but that riffling of the blue water out there was a white squall of the sort infamous in the southern sea, a brutal shift in the wind, in this case bearing right toward the coast, and the Fortunate sailing right along that coast. The Fortunate had that squall in their sights, too. Had it in their sights, bloody hell! That blackguard wizard might have stirred it up as a favor to the captain.

Hammer and anvil, the coast for the anvil and the squall for the hammer, and them a good long ways behind. The Fortunate was meaning to skin through, pass by that deadly rocky headland before the squall came sweeping down on that coast, and leave them in her wake. It intended the squall to cut them off, to force them to veer out to sea and sail wide of the weather.

They were both short of water and short of rations, damn them, and if the Widowmaker had to turn out to sea, she had as well turn around and go back to the Isles, her prey escaped, all this long chase for nothing.

That or a long, thankless search in every cove and inlet on this impoverished, treeless coast, for a ship taking on water.

Crew had seen it too—exhausted crew that had been hauling up glass bombs and fitting the cables to the catapult. Some tried to point to the situation.

“Carly!” Camargen yelled for the bosun. “All aloft. Mizzen royal, storm trysails! Gunners, shift everything forward!”

Carly stared at him half a heartbeat, the whole intention implicit in those orders. The pipe shrilled. There was a moment’s awful hesitation, old hands knowing full well what the game was: It was in their eyes. But then they howled with one voice, “Camargen or the devil!” and top hands swarmed aloft to spread all the canvas she had, while gunners worked like devils to shift their light catapults to the forecastle to back up the bowchasers.

Camargen dived down to the xebec’s little cabin for another look at his charts. The shore was notorious for its hidden reefs. In sight of the shoreline, he had his landmark in the headland itself, and he set everything in memory well as he could, because they might sail on their wind right across the teeth of that squall, much faster than the Fortunate on this point of sailing, and they were going to have to run up the Fortunate’s backside and come under fire from that towering deck in order to clear that space of coast before the squall swept them onto the reefs. The crew saw their prize; they cheered the choice they saw. They knew they could overhaul that bastard. If they could withstand the fire she could throw long enough and not sink her, they could board and take her.

The crew was mad with desire, seeing gold for every man jack of them; and now he might have caught the contagion himself … hell, if he’d fall off now and let that Yenizedi dog skin past, laughing at them. Wizard or no wizard aboard that ship, they had old Korgun up there for a charm, and they were going to take that Yenizeder bastard this time.

He ran up on deck, already feeling the difference in the ship’s motion with the new sails abroad, and hoping their weather-worn canvas held … that was the devil in it, because if something carried away, they might not have the speed to make it past that squall. Fool, something said to him, reminding him there was still escape. Fool, no treasure is worth it. But there was no hesitation in the crew at all, who worked like madmen. Catapults brought to the forecastle were bowsed up to the fine, fair view of a square-rigged ship coming closer and closer, as the Widowmaker’s full spread of canvas hurled her along the fine line between that squall and hidden rocks.

Thought I didn’t have the charts, did you? he asked his enemy. Thought we’d not have the nerve? The Widowmaker ripped along, rigging singing, the whole deck humming. Old Korgun was getting a soaking up there, the bow wave sending up continuous spray, so that the gunners had to canvas their catapults’ cables and shield their slowmatches from the wet.

Closer and closer, with the white squall a haze on their larboard bow, and the Fortunate towering up ahead of them. No need for the glass now. A blind man could see the tall stern of their enemy, could see one head and another take a look at them over the taffrail—could see activity back there and know that they were preparing their own rain of fire and missiles, and their deck so high they didn’t have to worry about the spray. A silver-haired man leaned on the rail up there—Yenizedi, no question, and their wizard. Wind caught that hair and spread it like a banner.

“Off covers!” Camargen shouted at his gunners. “Fire at will!”

Canvas came off. Bombs were heaved up and settled into their padded slots, their fuses set alight, and thump-thump-thump! the catapults cut loose, two at once and the others close after, the glass bombs flying. One smacked against their enemy’s stern-post, one fell in the sea, and others hit near the rail. Silver-hair vanished for a moment and reappeared.

The gunners worked like fiends, angling up for maximum loft, winching back, no longer in unison. It was a race, and the first went off, then two and three so close they made one thump, sailing up and over the enemy’s rail, spreading fire. The fourth hit the rail itself, right where Silver-hair was standing. The heavy bomb splintered the rail and spattered fire.

Silver-hair’s robe caught. He made a futile gesture to put it out, turned in a sheet of fire, and in a gust of wind, lost his footing and fell, his black robes and pale hair a downward trail, a small flutter of fire amid the dark cloak.

“Ha!” the gunners crowed.

“Get that bugger!” Camargen roared to midships, and junior officers and spare gunners rushed to the rail to seize up two of the xebec’s long oars from their stowage. They ran them out, while the gunners kept lobbing bombs at their target, and now bombs came back, belated fire from a towering great merchantman. Bombs burst on the deck and made puddles of fire that spread in the watery sheet of spray as crew ran to dowse them and wash them overboard.

Camargen dodged between two such and saw the wretch hauled in, half drowned and snagged between crossed oars.

Silver-hair it was, but not the old wizard, not wearing any great ruby, but a young man, a drowned duck of a young man who coughed up water and had to be hauled up to his feet, streaming water.

“He’s not the one,” Camargen said as the thump of catapults went on and an enemy missile exploded off the mainmast. “Search him for valuables and pitch the bastard in the hold.”

“Fool!” the drowned man cried. “You’re caught, we’re all caught, we’re all gone mad! Turn back! Turn back now or we’re cursed, all of us are cursed!”

The hands had their superstitions. “Wot curse?” one asked, shaking him.

“There is no curse,” Camargen said, grabbing the wretch by the front of his icy shirt to shut him up.

“Curse there is,” Silver-hair said, teeth chattering, lips turned blue. “We’ve been years at this, years, now, and we’re both caught in it. Cut Korgun free and fall back or we’ll all be caught, forever. It’s not a natural storm! We’ve all run mad, and there’s no end to this chase!”

“Cap’n!” the lookout cried. “Cap’n!”

The merchantman ahead of them half vanished in a blinding gust of windswept spray. From a mile away the squall swelled up between one breath and the next and drove down on them in a blinding mist.

There was no time for fools. The gale rushed on them. “Helm!” Camargen shouted, seeing that the helmsman was struggling. “Hargen, Cali, to the helm!” A solid wash of spray broke over them, and he struggled aft, to make his orders heard. Their chase was aborted. They were, with the merchantman, fighting to get through, if they had gained enough headroom around that point of the coast “Shorten sail!” he yelled, under a wash of water. Sea and sky began to mix, and the air was a steady roar as he turned.

Their prisoner had escaped. Silver-hair was hand-overhanding his way forward, toward the catapults and their glass bombs.

“Damn it to hell!” Camargen ran to stop him before he got to fire that would float and burn. “Stop him!” But Silver-hair had dodged past the gunners, struggling to secure their pieces and their fire-globes, ran the length of the forecastle and clambered up onto the bowsprit as Camargen gave chase. Metal flashed in Silver-hair’s right hand as he clasped the bowsprit with both legs and his left arm, cloak let fly to the storm, shirt soaked, hair streaming cometlike against the storm.

“Damn you!” Camargen pushed past the startled gunners and seized a hold on the bowsprit himself, saw Silver-hair forge farther and farther out, toward the end of the bowsprit, where the mainstay held, the stay of not only the mainmast, but all the masts, Silver-hair with this shining metal in hand, and no good intention.

Bent on killing them all, on killing the whole ship. If that stay went, they were dead men, all.

Water, fresh and salt, mingled in the air. Camargen swarmed outward on the bowsprit, got hold of Silver-hair’s leg and hauled, and Silver-hair half lost his hold, turning with his back to the gale and his free hand lifted, holding not a knife, but a wizard’s wand.

“The hell you do!” Camargen shouted against the wind, and hauled with all his strength, for life itself.

A violent gust hit them. The Fortunate completely vanished behind a great mountain of water, and the Widowmaker nosed down, her bowsprit aimed at the trough. He seized a fistful of trouser-leg and hauled with all his strength, to get his hands on Silver-hair himself.

Silver-hair slipped further, and grabbed him. “You don’t understand,” Silver-hair shouted at him. “Let me get us through!”

He had a grip on Silver-hair’s belt now, hauled him against the bowsprit only to get his hand on his throat, and as he did, Silver-hair slipped, dragging them both over, dragging them right down where rope and chains held waterlogged old Korgun. With a crack like a catapult, the bowsprit shook.

Canvas had ripped, a tattered streamer of the lateen foresail blowing over their heads, trailing its sheets. Then, sickening shock, the great cable of the mainstay parted a strand, and another, unwinding before their eyes.

Crack! again, and something had given way. The whole mainstay parted, the mainmast pulled violently aside, and death was taking them apart, trailing canvas. Cables and canvas frayed and parted as if sudden rot had taken them. Camargen had Silver-hair by the throat now, and vengeance was all he had, vengeance for his crew, for the Widowmaker herself, for all the long sorry chase and the end of it in a watery grave. Old Korgun looked on, blue-lit in lightning and spray, and Camargen kept his grip, kept it while the timbers parted in a series of sickening cracks and lost-soul groans, and the whole fabric of the ship came undone. They went under together, tangled in each other, and while he drowned, he kept strangling the one who’d done it to them, in hatred more precious than his last-held breath.

Dysan awakened to sunlight streaming through a high window, dust motes swirling in the beam. He yawned and stretched luxuriously across his pallet of piled straw, enjoying the soft touch of a knitted blanket against his naked flesh. Though a small room, barely three paces across, it seemed like a mansion to him. It still carried the sawdust and mortar scents of new construction, and he could faintly hear the sounds of movement and light murmurs of conversation in the other rooms of Sabellia’s haven. He had no furniture, just his two sets of clothing lying in neat piles in each far corner, a chamber pot, and a bowl of water for washing. He could never remember feeling so content, so fabulously wealthy. All this, and the five ladies who spread Sabellia’s word, every one of whom he called “Mama.”

For the first time, Dysan appreciated the disease that had damaged him in the womb. Its effects, combined with the poison he had unwittingly consumed along with the other Dyareelan orphans slated to die, had stunted any chance he had ever had for normal height The size of a seven-year-old, he passed for one without much difficulty, though he was already a decade older. The priestesses babied him and worried that he never ate enough to pack weight onto his skinny frame. Someday, they would notice that he never grew at all and begin to wonder about his true age; but, for now, he intended to enjoy their pampering for as long as possible.

Dysan wriggled out of bed and dressed in his regular clothing. Though patched and faded, his tunic lacked the filthy crunchiness to which he had become accustomed; his mothers insisted on regular washings. Thin and soft, it barely kept out the soggy dankness that defined Sanctuary, but it no longer scratched or abraded his skin. He appreciated far less the frequent scrubbings that finally seemed to have banished the mites and fleas that had plagued him most of his life. Though no part of him had properly matured, tooth gritting and mental distraction could not dispel the unholy thoughts that assailed him whenever the youngest of his mothers, SaKimarza, washed certain places.

Dysan pictured her now, her fine Rankan features softened by a cascade of russet hair with just a touch of gold, her body soft and curvy in all the best places. Thoughts of her stiffened him, and he cursed the affliction he had cherished just moments before, the one that allowed this one awkward remnant of adolescence to blossom in an otherwise childish body. She was only five years older than he, yet as unattainable as the goddess herself. He called her “Mama”; she thought he was seven.

Regaining control of his nether regions, Dysan used the chamber pot, then pulled on his leggings. He opened his door and stepped onto the landing of the two-story building that now stood where his ruins once had, on the Promise of Heaven. The upper level held their private bedrooms, the library, and the study. Downstairs, the women cooked, washed, and met with clients, most of whom came for solace, to learn of or admire the goddess, or for advice. His mothers happily entertained anyone who chose to visit, spreading the word and love of Sabellia to the women of Sanctuary, performing with a selfless goodness he had never before experienced. It had all happened so fast; and, even half a year later, he found himself awakened by nightmares that his past had found him despite his mothers- and goddess-protected haven.

As Dysan headed toward the stairs, a grunt of frustration exploded from the library. He changed direction in midstride, effortlessly, and knocked at the door.

He received no answer.

Anyone else would have taken this as a warning, a plea for solitude; but small talk and custom tended to elude Dysan nearly as completely as counting. The infection had warped his mind, damning him to a life without numbers or social competence, even while it made him a raw genius with sounds and language. The Dyareelans had manipulated and pounded that instinctive ability into a talent. Dysan could stare at a bird for an hour and might not recall its size or color when he looked away, yet he could reproduce the exact pattern of its calls and whistles, as well as any conversations that had flowed around him at the time. Anything he heard, with or without intent, remained forever lodged in memory.

Dysan pushed open the door. “Mama?”

Again, he got no answer, though he could clearly see the leader of the order, the Raivay SaVell. She sat in the room’s only chair, her back toward him, hunched over a desk covered with an array of books. She wore her steel-gray hair functionally short, and it fell in uncombed feathers to the nape of her neck. She stiffened at his entrance but gave no other sign she heard him.

“Mama?” Dysan trotted toward her.

Finally, SaVell dropped her quill and glanced at Dysan over her shoulder. “Not now, please, Dysan. Why don’t you go downstairs? SaShayka can make you some breakfast.”

Curious, and oblivious to the edge in her voice, Dysan walked right up to the desk. Two scraps of paper lay in front of SaVell, one badly crumpled and covered with hasty scribbles, the other blank. He stared at the written one for several moments, at first seeing only oddly angled lines and squiggles. Then, his talent kicked in, and the scrawlings arranged themselves into proper words. “What are you doing?”

Apparently resigned to the realization that Dysan was not going away, the Raivay sat back in her chair. She turned her attention onto the boy, her aristocratic features set in irritation. “Dysan, please. I’m trying to do something very difficult, and I’m not having any success. I’m frustrated with the whole project, and I really do wish to be left alone.”

“I understand,” Dysan murmured, finally getting the point but now too caught up in the writing to obey. “I … just wonder …” He met the woman’s piercing yellow gaze. “ … what business a good priestess of great and loving Sabellia has with the Bloody Hand.”

SaVell’s eyes went round as well-minted coins. Her nostrils flared. “What?”

Dysan retreated a step. He did not usually shy from sudden reactions, the way most of the survivors of the Pits did. He had only gotten whipped once and had only felt the first blow land before unconsciousness claimed him. The Dyareelans had known better than to risk their frail, young spy, with his uncanny verbal skills, at least until they found a better one.

“I’m just wondering why you would have such a thing here.” He pointed at the wrinkled paper, battling memories that threatened to overtake him, like they had so many times. He would give up his room and comfort, all five of his mothers, to avoid any further interaction with the cultists.

The Raivay did not bother to follow his gesture. “Dysan.” She rose from the chair. “Are you quite sure these writings come from … them?” She spoke the last word with clear disdain.

Dysan focused on her voice, which kept him lodged in the present. Feeling queasy despite his mental victory, Dysan nodded, his thick black hair barely moving. No matter how often the women combed out the tangles, they always returned by morning.

Still staring, the Raivay SaVell lowered both hands to the desktop. “I’ve been trying to interpret it all night and morning.”

Knowing what the paper contained, Dysan did not understand. “Why?”

“Because a young man brought it here. He said it was priestly writing and promised a generous donation if I translated it for him.”

Dysan knew his mothers accepted almost any hard-luck case that came their way. The women had arrived in Sanctuary with money, but he had stolen and spent it in a vain attempt to evict them from his ruins. Now they relied on donations, including the coins Dysan sneaked anonymously into the till from pickpocketing and his thus-far rare hirings. He had no idea how close he had come to replacing what he had pilfered. Five was the highest number he could reliably count, and he knew his mothers would not approve of what he did if they knew it consisted of thieving and spying. “Sanctuary has a linguist. Heliz Yunz—”

SaVell interrupted. “Our visitor says he tried the linguist first Distractable fellow, apparently, and not particularly agreeable. Our client used more colorful language, but I get the idea that Heliz tends toward … let’s just say … condescension.”

Dysan did not mention that he had observed the Crimson Scholar in the Vulgar Unicorn and overheard talk of him as well. The linguist of Lirt maintained a dangerously haughty and arrogant attitude for a man of little size and no martial skill; most dismissed him as an overeducated fool who would not last long in Sanctuary. Dysan’s ears told him much more. In a dark corner of Sanctuary, a city well known for its shadows, Heliz had once displayed a magnificent magical power harnessed from words themselves. Like many of the folk in this scummy, backwater town, Heliz Yunz was not what he appeared to be.

The Raivay brought the conversation back to the point. “Dysan, how do you know this writing bears the taint of the Bloody Hand?”

Dysan leaned across the desk to point at the lettering, though he would not touch it. He understood little of magic and worried that the paper might have some ability to suck him into itself, to hurl him back into the years of horror and madness. For an instant he considered placing his fingers upon it for that reason alone. He had despised the life he had barely escaped ten years ago; but, at least then, he still had his beloved brother. “See here.” He indicated the upper part of the page and read: “All who inhale when the last ingredient is added will gain the strength of the blood-eating goddess for a fortnight. Rise up and slaughter thine enemies with thine mighty, bloody hands.” He ran an aerial finger down the list. “Here: the ingredients of the spell and, down below, the order and proper procurement …”

Suddenly realizing the Raivay had gone preternaturally still, Dysan stopped talking to glance at her. She sat in stunned silence, her hands curled on the desktop, her jaw limp.

When she said nothing, Dysan spoke again. “What?” Defensiveness colored his tone. He worried that Raivay SaVell might explode. Now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve lost everything. His head drooped, and the dark tangles fell into his eyes. The past half year had seemed too good to be true; and, now, he believed, he would pay the price.

Finally, the Raivay managed speech. “Dysan, my dear. As long as you’ve been with us, how come this is the first I knew you could read?”

Dysan shrugged. “No one ever asked.”

“Of course no one ever asked.” SaVell looked down at the paper, her regal features screwed into an uncomfortable array, as though she had taken a bite of bitter fruit. “One makes assumptions about a child who can’t count his own toes. You are a mass of contradictions, young man; and I wonder if we will ever find you under all of those layers.”

Only glad his oldest mother did not seem angry, Dysan smiled.

“Can you also write?”

Dysan flushed. “Not … well.” It was an understatement. Though quick and agile when it came to movement, he lacked the fine finger coordination needed for such a task. He could swipe a purse or other object with considerable skill, but his letters came out smeared and wobbly. He interchanged languages without meaning to, much as he had verbally when first learning to speak. He had overcome that flaw with time and assistance. He suspected he could learn to write with enough training, but he had no wish to battle through the frustration and effort.

SaVell turned back to the paper. “What tongue is this in, anyway?”

Dysan’s blush deepened nearly to scarlet. “I … don’t know.”

She looked up quickly.

“I don’t get it, either,” Dysan admitted. “Don’t try to make sense of it, Mama. It’ll tie your brain in knots.”

SaVell laughed, a throaty sound Dysan did not believe he had ever heard before. She had always been the most serious and intent of the group, the most committed to the order, the one who kept the others focused and in line. “Forgive me testing you, but I need to know for sure before I accuse a man of ties to Dyareela.” She shoved a book in front of him. “Read this.”

This time, the letters took shape much more quickly, as the more familiar Rankene script leaped into bold relief. He read a line carefully, watching Raivay SaVell from the corner of his eye. She studied the words over his shoulder, saying nothing. Not that Dysan needed any encouragement. His language skills were the only thing that had never failed him, and he would trust his own rendition of what the writing said more than even Heliz the linguist’s.

At length, SaVell pushed the book aside. She ran a finger along her lips, then tapped them twice. “Remarkable.”

Dysan said nothing.

SaVell yawned, rising. “Well, I suppose I should tell our young visitor that we couldn’t make sense out of this.” She reached for the paper.

“No.” The word escaped Dysan’s mouth before he realized he intended to speak.

Once more, the gray-haired lady looked at him, awaiting clarification.

“We need his money.”

SaVell sighed. She could hardly deny it. A favorite saying of hers was “Food may grow on trees, but you only eat if you own the tree.” The Sisters of Sabellia were often so eager to perform good works that they forgot to request payment even for services that demanded it or people who promised. Things loaned out often never returned. A huge Irrune mercenary named Kadasah had twice offered to treat the ladies to meals, then skipped out on the tab. Dysan could not count, but at least he had the business sense to collect on monies promised.

“There’s a principle here, Dysan. I’d rather go hungry than spend money tainted by evil.”

Ideas floundered through Dysan’s mind. “Then skip the donation this time. Once word gets out that the order will translate for pay, other customers can make up the difference.”

“Dysan—”

“So we should lie, then?” Dysan knew the suggestion would inflame. His mothers lectured him extensively on the virtue of and need for honesty.

SaVell cringed. “I can tell him the truth, that we don’t assist in the workings of evil. That I could translate for him, but I choose not to.”

This time, Dysan could not stop the flood of memories that assailed him: mindless children with empty, soulless eyes ripped apart; a screaming, weeping woman with the savagery of starved dogs; a priest triumphantly clutching a severed head over an altar, scarlet rivulets twining down his arms to mingle with a swarm of tattoos. Those visions, and so many more, had left scars more painful than anything the womb disease had inflicted upon him. “They’re dead,” he forced through gritted teeth, his voice a hoarse whisper.

SaVell dropped her own volume to match his, and her tone gained a touch of gentle and sympathetic magic, the kind that drew out painful confessions like pus from an opened abscess. “Who’s dead, Dysan?”

“Them,” he said, with venom, battling innocent rage and deep-seated agony. “The Hand. They were all executed. Every … single … one.” He looked at his oldest mother, feeling as vulnerable as he looked. “Right?”

It would only take a single syllable to quell Dysan’s fear, but the Raivay SaVell could not voice it. She would not lie to him. Instead, she gathered him into her arms, her words still pitched to soothe. “That’s what they say, sweet darling boy.”

Dysan was neither sweet nor darling, and he was not a boy any longer. He knew the truth, that nothing so evil ever truly dies. Somewhere in the deepest bowels of Sanctuary, a spare few or, perhaps, massive clots of Dyareelans laid low, awaiting their chance to wreak their malicious and brutal form of worship upon the citizenry again. He had heard the buzz in the Bottomless Well, in the Vulgar Unicorn, in every filthy, sodden alley and every slimy dive throughout the city. He heard everything, whether he wished to or not, and even the complicated and changing verbal codes of those who dwelt in the deepest of Sanctuary’s shadows could not escape a talent that sometimes seemed more like a curse. “Mama, you have to do the translation.”

The embrace ended in an instant. The Raivay held Dysan at arm’s length, as if to read his intentions from the expression on his face. Not for the first time, her eyes seemed to bore through flesh to his very soul. “What?”

“You have to do the translation.” This time, Dysan managed to sound self-assured and doggedly certain.

“Why?”

She did not immediately deny him, which Dysan took to mean he might still convince her. “Because we have to know what this man plans to do with it. We have to know if the Hand still exists; and, if so, where.”

SaVell nodded awkwardly. Dysan could not read her mood, he rarely could; but he sensed clear reluctance. “Then, I’ll translate incompletely. Get an ingredient or two deliberately wrong.”

“No!” The word was startled from him. Sweat trickled suddenly down Dysan’s back, and a flash of heat prickled through him, followed instantly by ice. He forced his eyes wide open, focused wholly on the single shelf fastened to the wall that held the few books not already on the table. To close his eyes or look at SaVell would bring images of his mothers assaulted by hordes of foul-smelling tattooed men, raped on the altars and dismembered in the name of Dyareela, their screams lost amid the savage cheers, their blood staining the altar. “Please. They will know. Do not cross them.” His next words emerged in a pant as he strained against memories he dared not relive one more time. “They … will … come … here …”

“Sabellia will protect us.”

Dysan wanted to shake her. He wished he could open up his memories to her of innocent priests and priestesses dragged from their prayers by masses of torture-crazed and vicious children who knew only violence, to watch grotesquely tattooed men and women fornicate and defecate upon their altars in Dyareela’s name. Those holy men and women died in an excruciating, slow agony, their wits and bodies drained at the same time, their begging and crying only spurring the cultists. Instead, Dysan pointed toward the single window. “Don’t you see what remains of the Promise of Heaven? Crumbling, defiled ruins, all of them.” He guarded his tongue. “I love Sabellia for all she has brought me, but her temple was not spared.”

SaVell sighed deeply. “Dysan, I’ve seen the scars.” He believed she referred to the marks his single beating had stamped permanently upon his back and shoulders. “Gods only know what you went through or why, but surely there are better ways to root out whatever remains of that hideous, disgusting cult.”

The old wounds on Dysan’s flesh were nothing compared to the ones burnt deep into his psyche. He had never been normal, could never be so, but the Bloody Hand had seen to it that he never forgot his anomalies and weaknesses every moment of every day, and even into sleep. “Write down the translation as I tell it,” he begged. “Or I will.” It was an idle threat he had little hope of fulfilling.

“And if I do,” SaVell said, still staring at him with grim, yellow eyes. “Who will see to it that the ritual written here is not consummated?”

Dysan hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. “Leave that part to me.”

Glog!

The wave shoved Rogi down again, and a great bubble exploded from his mouth as he spat the oath underwater: “Thshite!”

Rogi fought his way upward, yet even as he broke through the surface—thnk!—the box slammed into the back of his head.

Down went Rogi once more, the little hunchback now caught in the undertow and dragged along the mud and silt and sand.

In spite of his panic, in spite of clawing for purchase even as the powerful riptide slammed him repeatedly into the bottom and rolled him and tossed him somersaulting, Ith thith the end of Rogi? he wondered.

Just moments before, as he’d stumped along the western shore of the White Foal and swatted mosquitoes and shooed away gnats and picked off leeches while he hunted the rats who frequented the fringes of the Swamp of Night Secrets, rats that occasionally came out from the reeds to the shoreline to hunt small crustaceans and perhaps lick salt from the rocks, as the sinking sun hung low in the sky, Rogi had “thspotted a chetht” tossing to and fro in the whitecaps and tricky currents ’round the Hag’s Teeth, there where the furious rush of the White Foal met the cold surge of the sea. He saw the curious markings—runes mayhap—carven into the sides, and he guessed that it was something “thpethial.” Perhaps the rumors were true about the strange wreck out on the Seaweal Reefs; maybe this chest had come from there. Quickly, Rogi had stripped off his clothes, pausing momentarily to admire his dragon, and then he had plunged headlong into the heavy waves yet cresting from a blow somewhere far out to sea. The shock of the cold water shrank his dragon down to minuscule proportions, but Rogi persevered, swimming an ungainly sidestroke against the white-crested billows rolling in from the south, and the swirling, gurgling river current rushing down from the north. With water cascading over him and the long red hair growing only on the right side of his head whipping about in the currents, gasping between crests, he made his way outward to fetch this curious artifact … or so he hoped it might be. After all, if it were “thomthing thpethial” his “mathter” would reward him handsomely … perhaps even enough to visit the ladies above the Yellow Lantern and make his dragon happy.

But then a breaker had smashed him under and a swell had lifted him up and he had been hit in the back of the head by the box, and another roller had hammered him under again, where the undertow had grabbed him and hurled him along the bottom. And he had no air, yet needed to breathe, but could not, deep down as he was. And as he tumbled, the swift-running undercurrent crashed him against the skeletal ribs of the rotted remains of a longdrowned hulk, its keel deeply buried in the muck.

Desperately, Rogi grabbed at the wooden beam and managed to hang on, and then, as if climbing a tree, he shimmied his way up the curved member, his diaphragm pumping hard against his clenched-shut lips, seeking to draw anything into his lungs, whether it be air or not. And with black spots swirling before his eyes … all of a sudden was free of the seaward pull of the deep tow.

Now hastily scrambling upward, but still clinging to the sunken ship’s paling and with darkness sucking at his mind, at last his head broke free of the water, and—ghuu—uuh!—he sucked in sweet, sweet air, though with the offshore breeze blowing out from the swamp, others might not call it “sweet.” Yet to Rogi, nothing else in the troughs between combers had ever been so precious as the odiferous stench he sucked into his burning lungs.

With waves yet crashing over him, Rogi tried spotting the chest, the little hunchback scanning about in the surge. “Dogths ballths!” he shouted—glug!—as another billow washed by, “I’ve lotht it!” for he could see nought of the box tossing among the foaming crests.

Turning loose of the hulk’s rib, Rogi began awkwardly side-stroking in the direction of the tops of the waving reeds he could now and then see above the billowing whitecaps, and, struggling, at last he reached footing, muddy silt and sand though it was.

Waves knocked him down several times ere he gained the shore and, drenched, water runnelling from his completely hairless left side but sopping his extremely hirsute right, he made his way toward his clothing.

Rogi dressed quickly against the chill, for though the summer air was warm, the waters of both the ocean and the White Foal were startlingly cold. Even as he pulled on his breeks, he paused momentarily to mourn over his poor wrinkled dragon, but then hauled the pants up to his waist and cinched tight the rope he used for a belt. Throwing on his shirt with its too-long sleeves, he plopped down and slipped into his floppy-topped socks, one of his toes seeking freedom through a hole. At last he slipped into his shoes, with scrap leather stuffed inside to make him taller than his considerably short four foot six, though, hunched over as he was most of the time, he seemed more like three foot four. Finally, he flopped a great length of his long red hair from the right side of his head over the bald left side—the mother of all comb-overs, someone at the Vulgar Unicorn had called it—and jammed on his ear-flapped cap, tying the cord under his chin.

As he turned to take up his blowpipe and drugged darts, “Vathankath’th member!” he cried, for in the fading light and washed ashore not ten feet away lay the rune-marked chest.

Pel held the compress on Tredik’s right biceps until the bleeding stopped, then dabbed at the deep slash with an antiseptic wash. The fair-haired carter’s lad watched him work, the pain dulled by a very small amount of poppy in a large slug of willow-herb tea. Pel wanted him conscious so he could appreciate what he was going through.

“Don’t tell my mother,” Tredik pleaded, as Pel sewed up the slash.

“That you’ve been brawling?”

The young man—old enough to know better—reddened. To his credit, he didn’t make a sound as the sharp needle went in and out of his flesh. “Not exactly brawling. We were having our own tournament, see? We’re training up for next time. That Tiger lady, she shouldn’t have bested everybody in Sanctuary so easy.”

“Why not? If she was well trained, hale, and aware, she had as much chance as any fighter here.”

“But it’s not right, a stranger taking the prize in our own city. One of us ought to have defended it properly. I think it was witchcraft. If that old Torchholder had been around, well, he’d have spotted her for what she was. I mean, what she must be. A witch, I mean. No outlander ought to be that good.”

Pel smiled. He doubted that during the years of the Bloody Hand, or even the early times of Irrune rule, that anyone would have been invoking civic pride, but it sounded as though Sanctuary’s youth felt something for their troubled and fate-trodden city.

“Well, it’s too hot to battle like that,” Pel said gently, winding bandages over the now-clean wound. “Infection grows in temperatures like this.”

“Oh, so we should wait until winter rolls around again?” Tredik asked, rolling one mud-brown eye to meet Pel’s bright blue gaze. Pel had to laugh.

“There’s no right season for stupidity and high antics,” the healer said. “You’ll do what you do. It’s not up to me to stop you. I won’t tell your mother …”

“Gods bless you!”

“ …If you do.”

“Ser Garwood!”

“You can’t hide what happened to your clothes, can you?” Pel reminded him. “Those rips and all that blood? Take your time over the matter. You can pick your moment to tell her the truth. But she must hear it. What if you’d been killed? If you’re going to fight like a man, you must learn to take precautions like a man, and your medicine afterward. Speaking of which …” He produced a small clay bottle with a chunk of wax-soaked rag for a stopper. “One sip of this three times a day, dawn, noon, and nightfall. You haven’t got an infection at present. This will keep one from appearing.”

Tredik pulled his torn tunic back on over his head. “I’ll be a man, all right. What do I owe you?” His face turned red again. “I haven’t got much money. Everyone’s been telling me they’re broke and asking me to wait. It’s getting so my father is telling me to ask for goods to settle the bills.”

Pel sighed. Actual cash had been growing very short for him, too. Admittedly, the quality of wares offered in exchange for his services were becoming more interesting since the wrecked ship had been found, but there were items for which he must pay in coin. Bezul had been kind about exchanging some of the oddities, but none of the merchants could hold out indefinitely. Pel felt as though there was a wall somewhere, and all of the money of Sanctuary was disappearing behind it. The wall must be broken down, or the economy, key to rebuilding this wounded city, would collapse. He slapped Tredik on the back.

“My next workday is this coming Shiprisday. Percaro traded a patch of land he inherited to Bezul for a new plow blade. I took it off his hands for a herb garden. It’s full of rocks in all the wrong places, blocking the sun. There’ll be at least three of you helping me to lay out the plot. If you haul the stones out, you can have them, trade them to Cauvin if you wish. I don’t need them. I need the space for plants.”

Tredik gave him a grateful glance, both for finding a non-cash solution and for treating the debt seriously. He was of a man’s size, but still remained a boy in so many ways. Pel couldn’t remember having been that innocent. Tredik tucked the small bottle into his torn tunic, and made his escape.

He was the last of the brawlers to seek out Pel’s assistance. Mioklos’s son Nerry wouldn’t lose his left eye, but it had been a near thing. He was going to have one impressive scar, though it would never look as though it belonged upon the round and cheerful face that bore it. His sister Las was probably to blame for the entire mock tournament, whipping up their newfound patriotism into a frenzy. She had come out of the battle without a wound, and, Pel was sure, was lying her heart out regarding her involvement. The boys half admired and half resented her, seeing her as a pesty younger sister, but also, maybe, a future Tiger in her own right. Pel had known plenty of brave and fierce women who had fought for the Bloody Goddess. Please, he thought, may Las be a force for goodness—real goodness. He admired the Irrune for calling such a tournament, allowing any fighter to come forward and try their skill.

Pel had had few dealings with the Irrune since his return. The largely Rankene and Ilsigi population of Sanctuary had gone on with their lives as usual, trading and cheating, raising children, making love, building, eating and drinking, gossiping and arguing. It was splendidly normal in his eyes, a life he would never have foreseen taking joy in. Blasphemers, brutes, thieves, philanderers—so many would have merited death or punishment by Dyareela, but Meshpri—Meshpri loved them all. Pel had to work hard to live up to his new goddess’s altruism. But that was why she was a goddess, and he a poor, flawed mortal.

Maybe a roughed-up mortal if he didn’t pay attention to his potions! He went over to the altar where he had a beaker simmering over a candle. This medicine relieved the tightness of a weakening heart. It took two long days to prepare. Two pinches of heart root into the potion caused the liquid to foam up the sides of the ceramic beaker. As the bubbles subsided, the brew turned a bright red. Pel breathed a sigh of relief.

An answering exhalation made him jump. Heart root dust flew everywhere. He had been so intent on his preparations that he had not noticed the muffled shape just inside the door of the temple.

“Forgive me!” he exclaimed, hastily putting down the bottle of powder.

He glanced down into the beaker. A miracle that he had not accidentally dumped in more of the powerful ingredients. An over-measurement would have caused the potion to thicken and overflow spectacularly; plus, the stain would have been difficult to get out of the smooth stone surface of the altar. All was well. He turned his attention to his visitor.

The shape stirred slightly, and a pair of deep amber eyes rimmed with kohl looked out at him through the shadow cast by a fold of silky bronze cloth.

“You concentrate so deeply,” a husky female voice said. Pel didn’t recognize it. This was not Kadasah dressed up in camouflage. “I have been watching you. You are very careful.”

“Not so careful,” Pel said, with rueful humor. “I don’t normally ignore customers, M’sera … ?”

But no name was forthcoming. She was an Irrune; the accent was unmistakable, and she was tall. If he had been standing beside her, the top of her head would have been level with his mouth. The eyes studied him deeply.

“We … I … need someone who takes care of others. I hear you can keep a secret. Is it true?”

“I promise it,” Pel averred. “If you ask for my services, I will not tell anyone what passes between us. You pay for both treatment and confidentiality.”

“Under pain of torture or death?”

Pel eyed her, but the amber gaze didn’t waver. She wasn’t joking. “I have vowed to care for the sick and injured, though I hope not to have to suffer to help others. How may I aid you?”

The honey-colored eyes held steady for a long moment, as though making a decision. “I am not your patient. If you choose to come with me you must tell no one where you have been or what you have done. Do you swear?”

“Not to you,” Pel said. “To my patient, whoever he or she may be, and whatever it is the patient wants kept secret.”

A nod. “Then, come.”

“Wait,” Pel held up a hand. “I can’t bring my entire pharmacopaeia with me. What am I to treat?”

Another hesitation. “Infection.”

Chersey felt guilty.

When Dace had arrived at the changing house last winter, crippled and reeking of the Swamp of Night Secrets, she’d welcomed him out of charity. Charity was a godly virtue and Chersey, who’d come of age during the Dyareelan Troubles, had lived comfortably without gods until recently, when she’d warmed to the sensible words and good examples the Raivay SaVell espoused from the ruins along the Promise of Heaven. Charity, the Raivay said, was the path to Paradise.

Chersey didn’t worry about Paradise, but charity toward the Nighter had lightened her heart. She’d trimmed his dark brown hair and supplied him with new garments—

Well, not new garments. The changing house stored great quantities of secondhand garments. The boy, bless his soul, hadn’t cared that his new clothes weren’t. Chersey had given Dace a pair of boots, too. He’d appreciated the footgear, but his eyes had sparkled brightest for a carved-wood crutch her husband, Bezul, had dug out of the warrens.

Bezul admitted the crutch was one of the first items his family had traded after they’d descended to Wriggle Way from their former home among the city’s goldsmiths. Fools they’d been then: Folk didn’t come to a changing house when they needed crutches.

Except Dace.

The youth didn’t talk about the swamp; he didn’t need to. His life was written in his scars and, of course, in his withered right leg. He’d never used a crutch. What good was a crutch in a swamp?

Between the crutch and boots, Dace’s first days at the changing house had been a series of stumbling disasters. Chersey had come within a breath of banishing him from her kitchen. If she had, then neither she nor Dace. would have discovered that he was a kettle wizard. The boy need only taste a dish or smell it on the fire to deduce its ingredients. Chersey had been preparing food as long as she could remember, but Dace prepared meals.

Dear Bezul had been diplomatic, insisting that no one could make a better stew than his wife, but he’d come around when Dace began doing things that Chersey could never have imagined. Bezul’s redoubtable mother, Gedozia, had taken longer, in no small part because Dace wanted to take over the marketing and marketing was Gedozia’s domain.

A gimpy Nighter can’t bargain! They’ll take one look at him, raise their prices, and we’ll be on the street before we know it.

Then, overnight, Dace shed his Nighter twang as easily as he’d shed swamp dirt and rags. He spoke common Wrigglie now, and it was easy to forget he wasn’t cityborn.

That boy is shameless, Gedozia said when the two of them returned from the market; and, coming from Gedozia, that was a compliment.

When the first sultry spell of summer had settled over the city, Gedozia declared that her ankles had swollen and the thrice-weekly trek to market was more suffering than she intended to endure. Dace, whose every step had to be more painful than any Gedozia had taken, leaped at the opportunity to carry the household purse.

The household was eating better and spending less money—because Dace was not only a better bargainer than the old woman, he didn’t skim padpols for his own indulgence. Chersey had to tell him to keep a coin or two for himself. Youths his age needed a few padpols and she needed to assuage her guilt.

Like some high-born lady, Chersey consulted with her cook while the family ate breakfast.

“Any ideas for tonight’s supper?”

Dace looked up. He was chopping last night’s leftovers into the stockpot. Dace wasn’t a handsome youth. His grin was lopsided, as if whatever had crippled his right leg had touched his face as well, but his eyes were lively and his gaze was direct as he said, “Depends on what I smell along the Processional.”

Chersey laughed. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were looking for a finer kitchen than this one.” When Dace shook his head, Chersey continued in a more serious tone: “Really, you need to be careful—”

“The Processional’s there for everyone, Governor’s Walk, too. The guards don’t hassle me and if the nabobs don’t want me sneaking their recipes, they should tell their cooks to close the doors.”

“The guards aren’t there to protect you, not on the Processional. You’d be wiser to take the Shambles bridge—the way is shorter and if you smell anything around here, we can afford the spices.”

“Ser Perrez says not to worry, we’ll be rich soon.”

Perrez was the only household name Dace hung a handle on. He’d learned that flattery was the way to deal with Bezul’s younger brother, Gedozia’s favorite son. Chersey had watched Perrez grow from a dreaming youth into a scheming manhood and was wise to his dreams. She wished she could bestow that wisdom on Dace, but there was no putting old heads on young shoulders. If the youth’s wits were as sharp as his nose, he’d uncover the truth about Perrez soon enough with no help from her.

Kaytin feigned sleep as he heard Kadasah slamming around the hovel she called home. She made not even the hint of an attempt to move more silently in order to keep from waking him up.

And he so desperately needed to sleep. He had chased the accursed woman until she caught him, and now … Well, she was trying to use his manhood completely and totally up.

He would have liked to believe that she kept him so “busy” because she knew his reputation for being a lady’s man, and was afraid he would stray. Unfortunately, he got the distinct impression that when she wasn’t using him in one way or another she didn’t give a good damn what happened to him, or what he did, as long as he was handy when she needed him again.

Kaytin felt spent, but how could he possibly tell the woman he’d chased for years that one really could have too much of a good thing? In fact, Kaytin fully believed that if he begged for mercy she would find someone in the same minute who she believed could keep up with her.

Not that Kaytin believed any one man could.

Kadasah’s energy seemed to be boundless, and every time she killed one of the followers of the Lady of Blood, her sexual appetite became even more insatiable than usual.

And she had killed a lot of them lately. Or at least it seemed like a lot to Kaytin; of course his fatigue and Kadasah’s embellishments had blurred the actual numbers, but he was pretty sure she’d killed at least two in the last four weeks.

She would scour the area between the ruins of the Temple of Savankala and the Street of Red Lanterns, hunting for her prey. Sometimes when none of the Bloody Hand had surfaced for a while she would go into the tunnels after them with a stealth almost magical. So Kaytin knew damn good and well that she could be quiet when she wanted to!

Ever since that bloated, silk-clad pud Kadasah called her patron had given her four times her normal fee for the little added information she’d gleaned from their near-death experience in the tunnels, she didn’t need any encouragement at all to go right down into the ground. More times than not dragging poor Kaytin right along behind her.

Kadasah seemed to be highly motivated by money—a fact that defied all explanation, because she never seemed to have any, and she certainly didn’t have anything to show for it. She chose to live in the decaying outbuilding of an abandoned redbrick estate in the hills beyond the walls. The roof of this building was only a few half-rotted timbers with an old oilcloth stretched across it. The door had ropes where hinges should have been and a hole in the middle of it big enough to throw a cat through. There was no furniture, not even a stick. At night the only light was from a red lantern she’d stolen from the street with the same name. It hung from a tattered piece of rope tied to one of the before-mentioned half-rotted rafters, and every time she refilled the lamp she had less rope. When Kaytin asked why she didn’t just put up a new rope she explained that the one she had still worked.

There was a big stack of old blankets piled haphazardly in the middle of the floor, which she called a bed.

She owned exactly one stew pot, a skillet, a wooden bowl, and a spoon, all of which she kept in a wooden box by the front door of the three paces by three paces structure. She kept their food supplies in there as well, when there actually were any. And she—they—would stay here for days at a time, eating whatever might be in the box and whatever Kadasah could kill. Not, of course, including the cultists, though sometimes he wondered.

Kaytin had given up asking what the current burned animal hanging on a stick might be, deciding it was easier to eat it if he just didn’t know what it used to be.

Kadasah kept more in her saddlebags than she did in her house, except of course when the saddlebags were in the house. What she could pack into those bags never ceased to amaze Kaytin. It seemed that whenever she needed something for her “work” it was always contained within one of them.

Kaytin didn’t know just how much her “patron” paid Kadasah for the pieces of skin laden with scars or tattoos she left as proof of her kill—she had certainly never told Kaytin an exact amount—but he had a feeling that they could be living in the lap of luxury in some apartment in Sanctuary instead of out here in the filth.

He wondered just what she did with all the damn money. She gave him only barely enough to jingle in his pocket—Kaytin didn’t mind being a kept man at all, but he would have liked to be at the very least well kept.

It was true that they ate and drank a lot in the taverns and bars of the city, but they didn’t eat that much, and he doubted even they could drink that much. Besides, she made a frequent habit of sneaking out without paying her bills at all. Sometimes she’d even purposely start a brawl just to keep the barkeep’s attention drawn away from the fact that she was leaving.

In fact she stole most everything they needed. The only time Kaytin had ever seen Kadasah willingly part with money was to buy new weapons from the Black Spider.

Kaytin remembered the day well. He had found the shop shortly after it opened and happened to have been there to see the owner’s own prowess with the weapons he sold.

When later that day Kadasah had proudly shown Kaytin the new weapons she had bought to replace the ones that had been taken by the followers of Dyareela, he had looked at them, yawned, shrugged, and told her he’d seen better, and at better prices.

She demanded to know where, and he took her straight to the Black Spider.

In the final night of its waning the moon was a mere pale sliver that played hide-and-seek among the few blue-gray clouds lounging above the fired old town called Sanctuary. The lone walker under that pallid excuse for a moon was in her late teens or perhaps early twenties.

She did not look nearly as stupid as she did attractive, and yet here she was, a pretty-enough young woman demonstrating a contra-survival lack of intelligence and good judgment by turning down the paved narrowness of an alleged street well shadowed by multistory tenements. Why did not she, even as a foreigner to Sanctuary, at least suspect that she had entered a cul-de-sac forming one of the most dangerous traps any city could provide?

Lurking here in a less-than-savory area of the town named Sanctuary and sometimes sarcastically referred to as Thieves’ World, the alley whimsically called Sunshine Street existed for two blocks only. Its narrow length was mostly unlit and barely wide enough for the passage of a one-horse cart. Little sound invaded such a narrow walkway between tall tenements. The dying moon was a mere sickle in its final quarter, but happened to be almost directly overhead. Thus it lit the alley well enough to make it possible to distinguish only the brightest colors.

Perhaps that bright light dulled the suspicions of the lone walker—and perhaps also dulled her mind? At any rate, it also created many shadows and lurking places, and they yielded two men.

Chestnut brown of eye and of hair with a mild tendency to curl, the prey was more than comely. The predators were not, and both were considerably larger than her height and build. Both men wore dark clothing and sharp steel and neither was small. The smaller or rather less large accoster was neither good-looking nor ugly of face capped by wispy, hair-colored hair. He wore his soft cap of dark red at a jaunty angle that he probably felt made him rakishly attractive, a belief without foundation. The larger one had a large, dark brown growth of hair that wandered over the whole lower part of his face—not a beard, really, for that implied some gardening. Unfortunately the area concealed by that foliage did not include his nose, an unsightly growth that some might have likened to a truncated sausage.

“Just be a good little dummy and hand over that pretty-pretty bracelet, girl,” the larger one said, clutching a gentle moon of breast through her clothing, “and we won’t kill you after the rape.”

Her valiant struggling was to absolutely no avail against their strength. The night air was ripped by the sound of gasps, grunts, scraping footsteps, and tearing cloth. The outcome of that worse-than-uneven struggle was not in question.

“Damn!” the smaller of the two attackers said—not a small man at all, under his rakishly canted cap, but his hair-faced companion was a veritable bear. That accounted for his nickname, which was Wall. He wrested their prey against his namesake with a heavy sound of the impact of her left shoulder and arm and the squeak that forcible contact brought from her throat. Even so she sent a kick high up between the legs of the cap-wearer and did her best to bite the arm of the one who had the better grip on her.

“That there is gonna cost you the use of that leg for a long time,” he snarled, close to her ear—which was tickled by his veritable jungle of dark brown facial hair.

Alone in the unlighted street all three participants froze at the sound of a quiet voice from an unseen source. Sounding calm, it wafted down to them from above. Three heads jerked upward and three pair of night-large pupils stared.

“You don’t really mean to be doing this, boys,” that same voice said, as if stating plain fact that all should know. “You two just stop that nastiness and go along your way and maybe you’ll get to see the sunrise.”

Adrenaline spurted. Hairs rose abristle on two napes; the fine chestnut hairs on the back of the young woman’s neck were already erect. Squatting almost at the very edge of the roof a few feet above them in seeming supreme confidence was a slender youth little beyond his boyhood. Partly because of his squat and partly because his clothing was uniformly darker than that of the assailants, he did not look at all large. The silver slice of moon was high above his right shoulder, making his face a featureless shadow while affording him a clear view of the features, at least, of all three land-bound members of the encounter.

The bigger of the pair of assailants chuckled. “H’lo there, little feller. Careful you don’t fall off that there roof. You really think you can handle us both?” Without haste, he reached across the area where his tunic bloused over his belt buckle. There hung a sheath of unadorned old leather. From it he slid a knife as long as his thigh.

The level, quiet voice did not change, nor did the shadow-man move. “I really think I can handle you both without raising a sweat, you big cow.”

This time it was the other man who fouled the night with the sound of his voice. “You’re talking to Wall, and he’s a bull, not a cow, you froggin’ piece of shite!”

“Careful. I’ve heard both those stupid words so damned much in the past few weeks from too damned many copycats. I swore to carve the nose off any fraggin’ piece of bat-shite who used both at once.”

The big man chuckled again. He had made no move to lift his long knife. “Who in the seven hells are you, boy?”

The chosen victim of the arrogant pair was doing her best to edge away. Shadows beckoned …

And yet even she froze at the reply of the would-be rescuer on the roof.

“I am called Shadowspawn.”

“Sheeeeee-ite!”

“Not likely. My daddy knowed that oddling called Shadow-spawn. If that freggin’ super-thief is alive, he’s got to be older than rocks.”

The youth on the roof was not above theatricality in heaving a great sigh. “You’ve had your warning, ugly. A wise man once told me that a fool and his life are soon parted. You don’t have to go proving that.”

The man who was not as large as his companion grabbed their chosen victim by means of hooking a hairy and muscular arm across her throat. From behind her and above her head he glowered up at the accoster.

“I’d say you’re the one about to prove it, you fruggin’ shike!” he said. “Git far away from here and do it fast, or I break her scrawny neck.”

The squatting human shadow on the roof’s edge said, “Still making foolish noises, are you? Seems to me it’s a very pretty neck. Well, I warned you.”

And then in a blurred movement his hand rushed up and back and then forward, his lower forearm just brushing his ear. The result was that the wide-eyed prisoner heard the little humming sound that terminated in a metallic shing accompanying a thud. Of course she was not able to see the way the forehead below the soft red cap sprouted a silvery-shining steel throwing star. Four and a half points were in evidence, meaning that one and half of another were mostly imbedded. Yes, even in bone.

“Your pond-scum fool of a friend has just joined his dog-relatives in the Cold Hell, big cow,” the roof-squatter said, low. “Are you ready to join him and them?”

The big man turned out to be not as stupid as he looked. Without pausing to consider, he ran

The far from conventional hero of the little affray dropped down just as the victim, released by the fall of the man behind her, also sank to the pave. The shoulder of her mint-green tunic was torn to what most male observers would consider an interesting degree. She stared up at her rescuer from large dark eyes widened by wonder. He was nowhere near the size of the beast he had just frightened off. He was also positively bristling with sharp steel in various lengths.

“You … you saved me—a stranger!” She spoke those wondering words in an accent that was not born in Sanctuary.

He shrugged, and squatted beside her to look into a pretty, oval face that tapered down to an almost pointed chin. And oh, what skin! “True.”

She gazed up into a dusky face with features that made him appear to be in his teens. Except for the eyes. Strangely old, those eyes were, and accustomed to seeing ugliness. He was not a bad-looking youth, her hero, with a sensuous mouth, hooded eyes, and shaped brows. He wore unalleviated black, as if his goal was to be a living shadow, and his jet hair had not been cut in at least two years. It was pulled back into a horse-tail, pulled through a short, narrow sheath of dark leather.

“Did you k—is he dead?”

“Likely.”

“Are you really called Shadowspawn?”

“No. Shadowspawn is my mentor. My name is Lone.” In the large-eyed presence of an attractive and grateful young woman with golden skin more beautiful than any he had ever seen, he could not resist adding, “Some call me Catwalker. Are you ready to stand?”

“I … think so …”

Lone took her hand in a warm one with a rough surface. He noted that it was a small and quite dainty hand, but that it had led no life of leisure. As he rose to his feet in an easy, athletic movement, she saw that his every fingernail had been gnawed. A soul in torment, or the usual dread uncertainty of youth? When he exerted a bit of pressure, she allowed herself to be drawn up just as fluidly—but tottered a bit when she was on her feet. How pale she was, and how thin! Her eyes looked deep-set and yet huge—and at a height to gaze directly into his unreadable dark, dark ones. This black-haired boy or very young man was not tall, and looking into those eyes made her think that he trusted no one.

“Give me a name to call you by.”

“Janithe. My name is Janithe.”

“Janithe. Why were you in this night-dark alley?”

“It—it stinks, doesn’t it? Is there a stable just ahead?”

“Does that question mean you don’t want to answer mine?”

“I—I wasn’t really going anywhere. I am—I am a stranger here.”

He already knew the answer, from her accent, but asked anyway: “In this section of town, do you mean, or in my town?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, without showing teeth. When he said nothing but continued to gaze into eyes little less enigmatic than his own, Janithe was unable to resist providing more information.

“I just arrived from Caronne. I lived with my mother. She has been a widow for over three years. A little over a month ago she took a lover, and the moment she left for work he came after me. I know she likes him, a lot, and I love her and wish her happiness, and so I left. I came here to seek work …”

Lone left off saying that the only thing he knew that came from Caronne was the drug krrf and its deadly distillate. He did state his surmise: “And you have no money.”

She looked down.

“Lots of people haven’t,” he said as a kindness, in a voice with a shrug built in. It was so hard not to stare at her, with that beautiful, somehow glowing golden skin! “No one remembers the name of this excuse for a street, Janithe. It is used as often for the emptying of bladders as anything else, and hereabouts it’s well know as the Drainway. It ends less than a block ahead.”

“But it started just over a block back!”

“True.” His face did not change. “Do you want to tell me about that bracelet?” He indicated the long and exceptionally handsome ornament, which was at least plated with gold. What a strange set of curlicues it bore, and runes! In seconds her rescuer surreptitiously gave Janithe’s one item of jewelry the close examination of an expert thief. “That should bring you the price of lodging until you find work. Just a loan on it, even.”

She drew back in some alarm and grasped her braceleted forearm with the other hand. That told Lone that she was horrified or something like, and he decided with a mental shrug that either it had great sentimental meaning to her—or maybe she just could not get the thing off. He turned in the direction whence she had come.

“Coming?”

Janithe hastened to walk beside him along a street that might have accommodated one more person abreast. “I owe you more than money,” she murmured in a soft, more composed voice. “Why on earth were you up on that roof?”

Her rescuer made an unextravagant gesture. “Obviously it’s safer to travel by roof than by street!”

He was pleased that she giggled. “B—but—aren’t you afraid of failing?”

“No. My mentor put it best—‘it’s not the fall that a person needs to fear, but the sudden stop.’”

He was rewarded with another girlish giggle and was minded to tell her the story that Chance-who-had-been-Hanse had told him, with some relish. The sad tale involved a thief whose talent was definitely less than that of Shadowspawn—but then whose was not?

One morning near dawn this fellow, Therames, Shadowspawn said his name was, truly surpassed himself in laboriously ascending to the very top of a flat-roofed building in a neighborhood peopled by the well-off, and from it leaped to the slightly lower roof of another building, which he had judged unscalable. With great care and little speed he worked his way down to a window, and inside to his goal, which turned out to be a particularly nice evening’s take. He was almost discovered, eluded the almost-discoverer, and emerged laden with eminently salable and pawnable booty. So laden that the heavy sack’s weight forced Therames to grunt and pant his way back up onto the roof of that building. So laden was he, in fact, that when he made his sinuous pounce back to the first building, his sack of loot o’erweighed him and he fell five storeys to break his neck. Police of the city watch retrieved him and his loot. They kept the latter …

But Lone did not relate that to this interesting girl or woman, for she was speaking, posing still another question: “Why did you call yourself Shadowspawn?”

“If those two had any sense, it should have scared the snot out of them. Shadowspawn is my mentor, the greatest cat-burglar in the world, and a ferocious foe in a fight. Terribly good with knives of any length. Oh, fart.” He stopped and turned back. “I can be so stupid! I forgot something important! Stand right here where we can be sure you’re safe.” As he spoke he was tucking Janithe into a deep shadow at the wall of the leftward building. “You’re all but invisible in the shadow. I left something back there. I’ll be back faster than you can draw three breaths.”

That was not quite true, for extracting a death-star from the armoring bone of a man’s forehead was no simple task. By the time Lone had wiggled the steel star-shape free and reattached it prominently to his clothing—incidentally removing the undernourished purse from inside the dead man’s tunic—and hurried back to where he had left her, Janithe was nowhere in sight.

“Fart,” Lone muttered, partly because he was impressed, in addition to the dismay he could not help feel. He kept a close eye on the shadows as he departed the Drainway, but no, that was the way his mentor of the apt nickname vanished, but it was not the hiding place of Janithe.

The day promised interesting weather. The bright sun had not yet reached zenith over Sanctuary, yet already the air was warm and uncharacteristically humid. The timid zephyr that blew over the harbor failed to dispel the heat or offer any relief. In the south, however, a low bank of dark clouds mustered on the horizon. Dim flickers of lightning at their roiling edges foretold some turbulence.

Regan Vigeles idly tapped a small jewel-hilted dagger against one palm. Shirtless and in only a brief linen kilt and sandals, he noted the coming storm from the parapet of the apartment over his shop, then returned his attention to the horizon. His thoughts were on the distant Seaweal and his too-brief journey to the strange wreck that hung impaled. upon the reef out there. Better traveled than most men, he had never seen the vessel’s like before. Yenizedi at a casual glance, to a knowledgeable eye it bore design elements and markings of half a dozen unlikely nations, some of which no longer even existed.

For most of a month since the wreck’s discovery scavengers and treasure-hunters had worked to empty its holds and stripped its decks of anything valuable or useful. Among its diverse inventory they’d found a small cargo of weapons—swords and daggers mostly. More than a few of those had turned up in his shop for sale or appraisal, and they puzzled him even more than the origin of the abandoned wreck. As the owner of the Black Spider, the finest weapon shop in the city, Regan Vigeles knew weapons, their quality, their manufacture, and history.

He stared at the dagger again, the latest weapon from the wreck to come into his possession. It looked brand new, without tarnish, wear, or rust. There wasn’t even an accumulation of grime around the jewel insets. Yet, he recognized its manufacture, the fold of the blade’s metal, and the unusual design of the hilt.

The small blade in his hand was over eight hundred years old.

The dagger and particularly the vessel on the reef were pieces of a puzzle. They represented a mystery in a city where mysteries meant danger. So for a few padpols to a willing fisherman he’d boated out to see the wreck for himself. He still didn’t know quite what to make of his observations or how much information to include in his next dispatch to Jamasharem. But the Rankan emperor was keeping a close eye on Sanctuary these days; he would want to know about this.

Turning away from the parapet, Regan Vigeles seated himself on a small couch and leaned over an ornately carved wooden writing table. Setting the dagger aside, he drew a single piece of parchment from a narrow drawer with delicate dragon’s-head knobs, then an ink bottle, and a stylus. The breeze fluttered the edges of the parchment as he spread it on the table’s polished surface and began to write.

Before he completed the salutation, a loud crashing and shouting rose up the stairway from the shop down below. Channa, his housekeeper, screamed a sharp curse. Then she screamed again, and another crash followed. Grabbing the dagger, Regan Vigeles raced across the roof and descended the steps two at a time. Fleet shadows raced out the shop’s door before he quite reached the landing.

Channa lay sprawled on the floor beside her overturned mop bucket. Dirty water soaked her simple dress, and her dark hair hung in wet ropes over her face and shoulders. In one hand she clutched the shattered handle of her mop. The business end of it lay among the wooden shards and scattered small knives of a smashed display case. She waved one bare foot in the air as she sputtered and fumed and tried to sit up.

Bending down beside her, Regan Vigeles caught her by the arm and helped her to sit. Still blinded by her own dripping hair, she recoiled at his touch and swung the mop handle. He blocked the blow without effort and gently relieved her of her makeshift weapon.

“Be calm, Channa. They’re gone.” He brushed the strands of hair away from her angry eyes and grinned as she looked up at him. He might have chased and caught the thugs, but her safety was more important. “Did you give them a battle?”

Channa wiped a hand over her red face, spat, and wiped her tongue on the palm of one hand. “Indeed I did, Lord Spyder,” she answered firmly. “Conked one of ‘em good right on his pig-snout, and broke my mop over the back of another. Then someone turned my mop bucket over my head and knocked me down! Me, a helpless old woman that never hurt nobody! Now where’s my missing slipper?” Shooting a glance around, he found the shoe under the edge of her hem. It was made of felt and as wet as the dress, but she clapped it on her foot. Then, she snatched the mop handle back from her employer. “If they ever come back again, I’ll stick this so far up their arses I’ll be pickin’ their noses from the inside-out!”

Regan Vigeles, known only as Spyder, took his housekeeper’s hand and helped her to her feet. Like many of Sanctuary’s women, she was younger than she looked, and also tougher, a lot tougher. Surviving in Sanctuary made a woman that way.

“That’s my Channa,” he said when he was sure she’d suffered no real damage. “I’ll clean up the damage. You take the rest of the day off and spend some time with your daughter. Buy new dresses for both of you, because that one’s ruined.” He indicated the stains the dirty water had made on her garment. They would wash out with a little effort, but he was always generous with Channa. “Just tell the merchant you choose to send me the bill.” He winked as he patted her backside and aimed her toward the door. “Nothing too extravagant, mind you.”

Channa shook her mop handle at him as she rubbed her offended rump. “For that liberty, young lord, and for the lumps I just took from those rowdies, I’ll buy any dress I want, one that’ll make you sit up and beg like a dog, and every sailor in port, too.” She leered, then stuck out her tongue and returned his wink. “Though from what I hear, that lot’s got dresses enough of their own.”

Still clutching her broken mop handle, she departed through the door and headed up Face-of-the-Moon Street toward the ramshackle apartment dwelling where she made her home. Alone, Spyder watched from the threshold until she was safely inside. Then his expression hardened. With pursed lips and narrowed gaze, he studied the old building, noting the cracks in its facade and the black stone-rot, the crumbling outside stairs that led to upper apartments.

Soon, he’d have to acquire that building and the one next to it as well. But not so soon as to attract notice. Like his namesake, the spider, he knew well the value of patience and subtlety. He looked down at the ancient dagger he still held in one hand and tapped the blade on his palm. There were things to tell Jamasharem—and there were things best kept to himself.

He looked up and down Face-of-the-Moon Street, then toward the darkening sky before turning back inside. He had a mess to clean and a shop to set right again. Later today or tomorrow, he would have a visitor or visitors, and he liked his place neat.

“And the next I knew, the prince was asking for volunteers.” Beneath his grizzled hair, Grandfather’s pale, staring eyes glimmered with pride. “I could swim, and swim well. I was one of the first to step forward.”

Lightning flashed, darting through the smoke vents and every failing seam in the old building. Thunder rattled the shutters on their rotting leather hinges. Kadithe Mur huddled closer to the brazier, holding his breath, knowing well what came next, yet never tiring of his grandfather’s heartfelt rendition.

The prince, the golden-haired Kadakithis, had taken a handful of volunteers out on his beloved Shupansea’s huge ship. They’d braved the fierce storm to save the fishermen caught in the unexpected squall. Caught and stranded on reefs or drowning. Grandfather and the others had tied ropes to their waists and leaped into the foaming sea, searching for anyone still living. Kadakithis himself had dived with them, a prince risking his life for the humblest of his subjects.

Kadithe sighed and leaned against the cold stone south wall.

Together, Grandfather and his prince (with a little help from the ship’s crew and the other volunteers) had fought off pirates attempting to take his lady’s ship with one hand and rescued nearly a hundred men that day. Some said the prince had been a fool, had risked two hundred lives to save a handful, that there were always more fishermen, but to him the prince and all those who’d helped him were heroes, heroes of the sort which, with one notable exception, Sanctuary hadn’t seen in thirty years.

Not since Kadakithis had kissed Shupansea farewell and headed north to reclaim the Rankan capital, even as the Beysa sailed off to her own destiny.

He knew, even if others didn’t, that Kadakithis hadn’t deserted the city for the opulent life among the Beysa. He knew because Grandfather had been there. Grandfather had been denied the right to go with the prince. Kadakithis himself had pressed golden coins into Grandfather’s hands and told him to stay in Sanctuary, to care for his wife and young son.

And to remember him. To become a great artist and create … just a small statue of his prince, so others would remember him as Grandfather had known him.

Grandfather had tried to follow his prince’s parting orders, but the gods had deserted him—Kadithe didn’t know which gods and cast the blame pretty much equally.

Grandfather’s wife had died in the summer of seventysix—taken away by swamp fever. His son had lived to manhood, fathered his own son (Kadithe sighed and bit his lip) only to have the plague take son and daughter-in-law, leaving him with the howling, ill-tempered infant.

Well, Grandfather had never accused him of such uncivilized behavior, but he’d seen squalling brats enough in his fourteen years to know he must have been a sore trial to an aging, widowed metal-smith, in a city where Dyareela’s Hands of Chaos … appropriated … anything moving that was left unattended.

“Kadithe, dear boy.” Grandfather’s cane nudged his knee and with a blink, he was back in their tiny home. Squatters, they were, in a rotting wreck of a building no one had yet stepped forward to claim, but “home” it was and “home” it would be for Kadithe Mur, as long as Grandfather filled it with his warmth. “The worst of the storm has passed.” And indeed, something that might pass for actual sunlight filtered through the cracks in the wall and roof. “If we’re to eat tonight, you’d best stir yourself.”

Kadithe. Always Kadithe. Never anything but Kadithe. It was a good name, as names went, but sure as he lived and breathed, he knew his real name was Kadakithis, that his grandfather had named him after his beloved prince, then called him otherwise, for safety’s sake.

Not that his grandfather had ever admitted as much, but his hair had been golden once, and curly. Time had turned it to muddy brown waves and prudence kept it unwashed and so darker and straighter still, but once, he’d been his grandfather’s little prince.

“It’s Halakday. What do you say to some of Mardelith’s cheese? The Gods’ Gold would taste mighty fine with a bit of flatbread, don’t you think?”

Now … he swallowed a sigh and pulled himself to feet gone tingly … now he was his grandfather’s only hope for survival.

He clasped the arthritic hand extended toward him, pressed it, and kissed the forehead above those eyes whose sight had been burned out five years ago with slag from his own kiln. Payment, so the owners of the red hands had claimed, for his part in the downfall of their bloody goddess.

Better they’d killed him outright, flayed him inch by inch as they had their other victims. But no, they’d let him live—without his soul, his talented hands broken and twisted beyond creation.

“The Gold it is, Grandfather,” he said in the low croak of a voice that was all he’d had since that day. “If I have to bed her to get it.”

Grandfather laughed. It was an old joke, at least to Grandfather. It was what he had always said when Kadithe made a special request for dinner. What Grandfather didn’t know, and what he’d die before he told him, was that one day, perhaps all too soon, it might well cease to be a jest.

But not today. Today, he had something Mardelith might want far more than his own skinny, as yet extremely untried loins. Not today, and perhaps—he closed his eyes, thinking of that strange meeting with Bezul—perhaps never.

A quiver hit his belly, and for once, the feeling wasn’t hunger. It took a moment, but eventually he identified that strange sensation: hope. Two warm blankets (one for each trip), an iron skillet to cook their flatbread (he’d been using a large rock), a fork for turning the bread … a worn velvet pillow for him to sit on by the fire … .

He still suspected the changer and his wife of charity, but … he thought of that precious roll of glittering wire, the bright ruby he’d been guiltily hoarding for five years … damned if he wouldn’t make it worth their trust.

In the meantime, he and Grandfather still had to eat.

He padded his way through the narrow beams of sunlight to the heap of rubble in the corner of the room, rubble scavenged from the ruins throughout the Maze, rubble that was mostly firewood for the small fire he had to keep going for Grandfather’s sake, but which also served as camouflage for the far more precious tools. Grandfather’s tools. Tools for modeling clay, mallets of all sizes and weights for pounding copper into ornate trinkets … everything from the old shop but his kiln and forge.

And, of course, the raw materials: Those had been the first to go.

Copper, bronze, gold … statuary to jewelry—even iron and weapons, early on in the prince’s employ. If it was metal, Grandfather had worked it; if it was beautiful, Grandfather had made it.

Lifting the loose floorboard, he pulled up a charred, but still-sound box. One day, this salvage might end up in the fire, but for now, it held his own creations: a small handful of jewelry, punched copper lamp shields … all made from scraps of salvaged metal. He pulled out the newest shield, tooled with an intricate punch-pattern of his own design, and sand polished until it gleamed in a beam of light coming through a half-rotted plank.

Pride filled him as he remembered the way Chersey had looked at his necklace. Grandfather’s eyes were gone, but not his knowledge, and maybe, just maybe, not all of his magic, true magic, that born of hands and clay and bronze and fire, not gods and incantations. Grandfather had had no formal assistants, no apprentices. For fear of the Hand, Grandfather had never let anyone else into that back room where he performed his metal-working magic—and where Kadithe lived.

To the world outside the shop, there’d been no Kadithe. The plague had taken him along with his parents, or so Grandfather told the Hand-plagued world. As an infant, Kadithe lay, drugged to silence, beneath the floorboards. As a child, he’d been the assistant Grandfather had never dared to hire, the apprentice he’d never dared take on. Grandfather had been parent, teacher, and mentor in one. He knew the history of the Empire and Sanctuary, spoke both Ilsigi and Rankene and could judge the temperature of a mold to a nicety and pour a perfect bronze casting by the time he was seven.

But he’d never been outside the shop, never even met one of its infrequent customers, though he’d watched from his bolthole in their home above the shop. He knew Sanctuary’s streets, its buildings and gates, but only as maps and drawings. His feet had never been cold or muddy, and he’d known the sun only as shafts of light through cracked shutters.

Grandfather and the shop had been his life, and that had been all he’d needed … until, years after Molin Torchholder and the Irrune chieftain had supposedly banished them, the Hands came back.

After the Hands had taken Grandfather’s eyes, the shop and all its contents—save those tools, many of them unique to Grandfather and so irreplaceable—had gone to pay the priests and healers who had saved Grandfather’s life. What was left had kept the two of them alive for the better part of four years.

After Grandfather had recovered, Kadithe had gone outside the shop for the first time, as Grandfather’s eyes and banker. He’d learned the real value of money, had learned how to talk to people and even to bargain, after a fashion. Mostly, he’d learned not to bolt to the nearest shadow at the first hint of bell, footstep, or a voice other than Grandfather’s.

In silence lay safety. If the Hand couldn’t see you, hear you, and didn’t know to look for you, they couldn’t take you.

Anonymity and silence remained their allies. They’d become just another set of ragged inhabitants of a city slowly recovering from as black an era as ever it had suffered. But money had been finite and as their small hoard dwindled, they’d had to move into the Maze, where overnight the tangle of streets and alleyways could change. Now it was Grandfather who stayed at home, while Kadithe dealt with the outside world. Alone.

He didn’t know what he’d have done these last months without Bezul’s repair jobs. It was Grandfather who had suggested he try Bezul earlier that year, after he turned fourteen, old enough, so Grandfather said, for an employer to take him seriously. He had to wonder now if Grandfather hadn’t anticipated that turn of fortune. Curious that there’d been no word of remonstrance for his betrayal of their anonymity. In fact, Grandfather had simply smiled and asked to feel the new blanket.

Bezul had given him a whole new perspective on the value of his little creations. He had a few coins still, possibly even enough for Grandfather’s cheese for a single dinner. On the other hand … he rolled the shield in his hands, watching the light sparkle across its surface, then wrapped it in a scrap of cloth, which in turn he tucked into a ragged drawstring bag … .

With luck—and always he needed luck when it came to bargaining—he would be able to get enough of Grandfather’s favorite cheese to last a week or more.

Here’s what Little Minx did right before she went to hell:

She picked up four heavy ceramic mugs, two in each hand, and with a minimum of sloshing delivered the watered ale intact to one of the booths in the back. She dropped the ale and retired quickly as one of the drunks made a half-hearted lunge for her. She managed a false smile in recognition of the attention but would rather have had a few padpols by way of a tip instead.

Crossing the main floor, Little Minx nodded as a barrel-maker tried to flag her down to order the same rot-gut ale he always ordered these days. She dodged out of the way of another groper along the back aisle and pulled a meat pie of dubious provenance from the cook’s counter, delivering it to the third table on the right, where a group of dark-haired men stopped talking the moment she arrived.

Dropping the meat pie, she retreated, hearing the conversation kick in again in sharp whispers behind her. She orbited out of the range of a ham-handed swat at her backside and pointed to a bleary red-haired drinker two tables up who had clearly had enough. She announced his bar tab, padding it for a tip, and left him to sort through his change as she wound her way back to the bar. She stepped neatly out of the way of Big Minx, who was herself loaded with a heavy tray for the Ilsig party in the back room.

A firm hand grabbed a good section of her posterior, squeezing a full cheek. She wheeled, smacking the offending paw away, the worn smile on her face turning suddenly feral. She let out a string of curses sufficient to blister the tattered wallpaper and spun back out into the main aisle, heading for the bar, still snarling a blue streak.

Two steps later the floor opened up beneath her feet in a wide hole, perfectly circular. The pit within glowed with the light of burning embers, and smoke billowed upward in an acrid puff. Everyone in the Vulgar Unicorn who could look up did.

Little Minx had enough time to hurl one more epithet, then plunged straight into hell.

Something is rustling … wood grinds … impending pressure weighs on the air. A girl sits in her bed, knuckles white as she clutches worn sheets to her chest.

“Taran?” she whispers, as shadows shift about the room.

On the wall a mask of a face is smiling, white as ivory, painted hair twining to either side. Its eyes cast desperately about the room and perspiration beads its brow. But still—it smiles. The girl wraps the blankets around herself more tightly.

“Taran?” she whispers again, knowing even as she speaks that he is far far away. From the face on the wall comes a noise as if teeth are grinding, and then a girlish giggle.

Water leaks in beneath the windowsill. Beyond it, the girl sees fish swimming through dim sunlight filtered through endless blue. The grinding noise grows louder, and the face on the wall, still smiling, looks afraid. A body floats up to the window, unblinking, hair a corona of reddish-blond, its skin peeling and green.

“Taran!” the girl screams, “TA …”

“ … RAN!” Sula rolled upright suddenly, her heart pounding sharply. Slowly she recollected who and where she was, and when. Another nightmare, she thought angrily. Is there no end to them?

The gray light of the hour before dawn filtered through the window. She got out of bed, draping a shawl across her shoulders, and peered out. In the murk little could be seen. It didn’t matter—even the reassurance that it was only the sleeping city, and not that endless expanse under water, was enough to let her heartbeat slow.

She could still hear a faint grinding noise. She’d like to think it was simply the wind pushing against the inn, or perhaps a guest’s thunderous snoring, but after the last few weeks she knew better. An uninvited guest had come to the Phoenix, and its presence filled the inn like the stench of a dead rat in the wall. None of them knew what it was or how it had come there, but for the past month it had persistently driven out every guest her family had taken in, and she kept having the same dreams.

It was really too bad, when they had begun doing well enough to start making repairs and restoring the house to some of its former glory. The carved cabinet that stood now in the dining room, for instance, was just the thing, said her mother, to give it a touch of class. It had come from a ship that had grounded on the Seaweal reefs a few months ago. The purchase had taken a good bite out of their savings, and now there were no guests to make it up again.

Why Sula was the only one who seemed to be having the dreams, she did not know. The Presence subjected the rest of the inn’s inhabitants to waking torments—thumping at odd hours, cold spots by doors, blood seeping through the walls … . It was enough to frighten all but the most stalwart souls into a hasty departure. There was magic in her family, but until recently, she’d thought her twin brother Taran had been the only one with a sensitivity to the supernatural in her generation.

Was this some kind of sending from Taran? It seemed unlikely. When they were little they had been so close they hardly needed words. She shivered as a memory of using that silent communication to escape a squad of Dyareelans hunting for stray children tried to surface and was suppressed again. But the stresses of puberty had driven them apart, and besides, Taran was far from here. She had not expected she would miss him so.

Last spring her restless brother had signed on as a caravan guard. He had said he wanted to travel to Ranke to see their father’s homeland. Their mother said he’d just lost his head over that Rankan woman they’d rescued, but exposing Taran’s real motive for traveling had only strengthened his resolve. Would he ever return? He’d been gone less than six months, but it felt much longer.

Sula heard a creaking from the bed in the next room as her mother turned over. Soon Latilla would be up, badgering the rest of them to get on with the day. If she too had trouble sleeping she would never let them know. When the first manifestations had occurred, Latilla had announced that this was their home. They had survived the Dyareelans and a dozen other external horrors, and she was not about to let a common domestic spook scare her off now.

Holding to that thought, Sula twisted her fair hair into a knot, lit the candle that sat by her bedside, and carried it into the dark hallway, keeping her eyes averted from the pale face that smiled at her from the wall. Its tortured gaze followed her until the light of her candle was gone.

Pegrin wandered over and said, “Hey. How are things?”

“Splendid,” I told him. “Couldn’t be better.”

He grunted. “You about ready?”

“Almost. Just tuning.”

“Why?”

I grinned and didn’t answer. My cresca was a pretty thing, with a stained maple neck supporting a teak fretboard, a top of maple, and back and sides of reddish-brown prectawood; but there was an extraordinarily thick steel truss rod running all through the neck, so it was far, far stronger than it looked. It held a tune remarkably well. Me, too, I guess. I mean, about holding a tune remarkably well.

I touched it up a little, then gave Pegrin a small nod and a big smile. “Ready,” I said.

He gave me a half-hearted glower. “Do you have any idea how annoying it is to be around someone so perpetually cheerful?”

“Can’t help it,” I said, grinning. “That’s the beauty of the cresca; it’s a naturally happy instrument.” That wasn’t strictly true. The cresca can be mournful just by keeping the low drone going and ignoring the high drone; but I rarely play that way. Who wants mournful?

“Uh-huh.” He gestured to what passed for a stage in the ’Unicorn—a place under the rear balcony near the front of the room. “Go,” he said.

I went. I flipped my orange cloak over my shoulder (yes, orange. Shut up.) and sat down on a hard, ugly chair. My cresca snuggled into my lap. The audience eagerly awaited my first note. Heh. I made that part up. Actually, one old lady who was leaning on the bar like she needed to gave me barely a glance, and a fat little merchant flicked his eye over me with an expression of distaste. He’d either heard me before and didn’t like it, or else didn’t care. for my taste in clothing. Kadasah and Kaytin were enjoying another of their spats, Perrez was scanning the room for anyone stupid enough to fall for one of his deals (I’m not that stupid. Anymore.), and, to my delight, Rogi was nowhere in sight. Believe me, the only thing worse than no one singing along is Rogi singing along. I started the drones going, thumb and forefinger, then started in the comp for “The Man from Shemhaza,” which is a great opening tune. Two gentlemen who looked to be Rankan at the table nearest me (which meant I could have knocked one of their heads with the neck of my cresca) glanced at me, then went back to their conversation.

“Introduction” by Lynn Abbey. Copyright ©2004 by Lynn Abbey and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Widowmaker” by C. J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher. Copyright © 2004 by C. J. Cherryh and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Deadly Ritual” by Mickey Zucker Reichert. Copyright © 2004 by Mickey Zucker Reichert and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Pricks and Afflictions” by Dennis L. McKiernan. Copyright © 2004 by Dennis L. McKiernan and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Consequences” by Jody Lynn Nye. Copyright © 2004 by Jody Lynn Nye and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Good Neighbors” by Lynn Abbey. Copyright © 2004 by Lynn Abbey and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Gathering Strength” by Selina Rosen. Copyright © 2004 by Selina Rosen and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Dark of the Moon” by Andrew Offutt. Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Offutt and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Protection” by Robin Wayne Bailey Copyright © 2004 by Robin Wayne Bailey and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Legacies” byJane Fancher and C. J. Cherryh. Copyright © 2004 by Jane Fancher and Thieves’ World 2000.

“Malediction” by Jeff Grubb. Copyright © 2004 by Jeff Grubb and Thieves’ World 2000.

“The Ghost in the Phoenix” by Diana L. Paxson and Ian Grey. Copyright © 2004 by Diana L Paxson and Thieves’ World 2000.

“The Man from Shemhaza” by Steven Brust. Copyright © 2004 by Steven Brust and Thieves’ World 2000.

This volume of Thieves’ World^TM is, as always, dedicated to the loyal fans and followers of life in Sanctuary.

Everyone is invited to “browse” on over to http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/thieves-world to join in the on-line fun.

—Booklist