Anthology - Thieves World - Turning Points

Lone looked disappointed, but said, "When I draw back my hand you will see an earring that came from afar and is not cheap but also not as valuable as it looks. Call it a gift to your wife or your daughter. You choose which, Aris."

The taller, meatier man looked down at the object glittering in silver and green on his countertop. His glance around did not seem furtive and yet was. When he saw that no one was looking their way, he made the earring disappear.

"Falmiria or Esmiria will be grateful, Lone. It is surely worth more than the single cup you just drank."

"I said it was a gift."

A well-maintained mustache of major proportions writhed with Aristokrates' smile. "So is the cup you just drank!"

"Aris!" That, sharply in a female voice, from the kitchen.

"Ah. His master's voice," Lone said.

Aristokrates rolled his eyes. "Go to hell, Lone."

"Be patient," Lone said with a wink. "Surely I'll not be making that journey for a while yet!" With that he put on another expression altogether before turning away to stand and pretend to survey everyone. His manner was that of a man of supreme confidence; the commander of an army facing a mob armed with staves.

The watching Strick's mutter was only for the ears of his companion. "He seems to have the stance right!"

Chance snorted. "Well, he knows how to posture!"

After a couple of minutes of such posturing, Lone swaggered to the door and outside into the darkness, where he seemed to belong. He was heard to snap a curse when a seriously warped plank in the boardwalk paralleling Tumult Street forced him to execute a little hop-skip step. And then he… well, droop-eyed Cajerlain the Twit-chy, lounging at the mouth of Angry Alley not far away, later swore by Theba's Immortal Crotch that the cat-walking lad just disappeared.

The woman who stood with her back against a wall while he groped her bore out his story, too.

A little under an hour later Chance and Strick also settled up and departed amid the tap-step-tap of Chance's cane and right foot. About a half-block along, one of those embarrassingly little yellow and brown and high-voiced dogs began yip-yapping before they were anywhere near the territory he considered his. His frail-looking little body bounced with each yap.

"Yip-yap yip-yap yip-yap," Chance said. "What a temptation to introduce that imitation of a dog to a throwing star!"

"Ah, that little beast is not worth it."

"Just a little one," Chance persisted, tap-step…

Strick paused and addressed the animal directly. "Imitation Dog with the voice of a bird, you are never going to be able to understand what happened, but hereafter you are not going to be able to bark again unless someone is within three steps of you and headed your way."

Chance smiled broadly. The yip-yapper's mouth continued to move but no sound emerged. Wearing a distinctly puzzled look, the dog dropped back onto his tail and sat staring at the passersby from wet eyes. Neither so much as glanced at him. The dark one was chuckling as they went on their way.

Even though gold showed here and there on his person, a master mage had little to fear when abroad at night in a neighborhood that, while not the worst, was also not wholly safe. His lack of fear of being accosted was bolstered even more when he was in company of the man now called Chance. In fact that proved to be the case this night, when not even a block and a half from the inn not one but two were so foolish as to accost them.

The burly one addressed them in a cultivated snarl that unfortunately made him sound sillier than it did deadly. "Let's see the sight of your purses and them rings, whitey, or you two old farts are going to get stuck with sharp steel!"

Strick spoke very quietly. "I am the Spellmaster," he said. "You boys don't want to do this. You had better run along."

"I don't give a shit if you're the Shadow God hisself," the thinner man with the long knife said, as if anxious to prove his fundamental stupidity and perilous lack of judgment. "Do what my friend says."

Since the attention of both accosters was now focused on Strick, his black-clad companion proved that his limp was false, and too that he was left-handed. His cane, startlingly heavy for the last eight or so inches of its length, became a weapon that all but brained the one with the bigger knife and drove deeply into the midsection of his burly companion. With a spin that proved him no cripple, Chance whacked the side of that one's head, too. The sound of impact was alarmingly loud. Both would-be thieves went straight down and lay moveless half on the boardwalk and half in the street.

The friends exchanged a smile.

Strick shook his head. "A pair of men with a staggeringly bad grasp on reality," he said.

"Old fart indeed!" The offended sixty-seven-year-old kicked one of the men he had knocked unconscious, but in the leg and with not all that much force. "Candlelight!"

"What?"

"I called him Candlelight. One blow and he's out!"

Strick laughed. "No question: You've still got it."

Chance had used his left arm only, and the right continued to hang as if asleep, or dead. That had been the case since that horrible occasion when the man who had always been left-handed had awakened from… something; sleep?-he had no memory of what had gone before the waking-to discover the disconcerting fact that he was looking up into concerned faces, most of which belonged to strangers, and that his right arm no longer did what he wanted it to do. It continued in that worse than distressing behavior, and was often cursed by its possessor.

"You had a stroke," a medical type or shaman improbably called Changjoy told him. Whatever in the coldest hell that meant-a stroke of what?-struck by whom or what?-it essentially ended the career of the seemingly invisible Shadowspawn, the world's most brilliant cat-burglar.

Now he of the disrupted arm, livelihood and lifestyle went on his way homeward with his friend Strick, at home in the night and its shadows… without knowing that every moment of his violent reaction to a robbery attempt had been witnessed from an overhanging roof just above them by a vitally interested young man whose all-black attire helped to conceal him in the shadows.

"So his legs are not crippled and the cane is weighted as a weapon," he muttered, only to himself. "But that right arm must be useless or nearly. And it is him!-it has to be!-he is Shadow-spawn!"

The young man, smiling and nodding only to himself, would see to it that a man named Tregginain had a new nickname…

Candlelight.

Komodoflorensal paid little attention to the countryside here, north of Sanctuary. Sometimes picturesquely beautiful, it seemed unexcited about the imminent arrival of spring and the colors it would bring to decorate the land. On his way back to Sanctuary after making a little delivery for his master, the apprentice mage rode a medium-size horse of a medium rust color. The animal and its accouterments belonged to Kusharlonikas. Its bridle and saddle with its high back braced and shaped by carved wood, were of old, tired-looking brown leather. Komodoflorensal wore a pair of aged long-riding pants of similar brown leather, and a high-necked, sleeved tunic vertically striped in burnt orange and off-white. The sun had made a belated appearance along about midmorning, its heat persuading him to roll up his lime green cloak and lash it behind the saddle with its cantle of leather over wood.

His thoughts were on his life and his brilliant but cruel master. They were soulful thoughts, and some of them were tinged with sadness.

It was a difficult life, being apprenticed to a man who was often worse than "merely" difficult. Komodoflorensal, however, was born to nothing of no one whose name was remembered a few moments beyond death. Naturally such a youth considered himself lucky to be in the service of Kusharlonikas. His master was the man he most respected and admired, and the apprentice's only aspiration was to be as exactly like him as he could make himself-with the aid of his master, however painful. To that end, the diminutive mage-to-be swallowed the bitter fruits the old man served up, and tried not to dread the next manifestation of impatience.