Anthology: Thieves World: Turning Points

"Raith said that?" the black-clad man asked with the raised eyebrows of surprise and new-found respect.

Cauvin nodded. "Everything went dead quiet-you could hear the froggin' flies buzzing around Zarzakhan. But that's not the strangest part-"

"I might have guessed."

The two men were alone on a hill outside Sanctuary, their conversation lit by the faint light of a silver moon.

The black-clad man's name was Soldt and he was a duelist-an assassin-who'd come to the city years ago to solve a problem called Lord Molin Torchholder. The Torch-no froggin' spring chicken then, either-had outwitted him and Soldt had wound up staying on as the old pud's eyes, ears, and, sometimes, his sword. He was another part of Cauvin's legacy.

"While I knelt there," Cauvin went on, "not daring to froggin' breathe , the light began to shimmer-"

"Zarzakhan catching fire?"

"No-not that froggin' strange. The guard-the spear man who'd played the part of the sun? I looked up and he was shaking all over- laughing . Shite, I'd forgotten he was even there; we all had- and that's the way he meant it."

Another arch of eyebrows.

"I blinked and the man's eyes were glowing red."

"Ah, Yorl again, Enas Yorl. Spying on everyone. How long do you suppose he's known we were fated for two eclipses in quick succession?"

"I didn't get a chance to ask. I blinked again, and he was gone."

"And then Zarzakhan caught fire?"

"No, the guard was still there-looking like he'd just awakened from a nightmare; Yorl was gone."

"That's new. He's finding a way to turn that shape-shifting curse to his own advantage. You've got to ask yourself-who would benefit more from a little sky sorcery? Doesn't want any competition, that's for sure. Figure he'll show up in the tournament?"

Cauvin cleared his throat. "All the more reason we've got to have someone there… and it can't be one of the Irrune, even though Raith volunteered, of course, and you know the Young Dragon would eat dirt for the chance."

Soldt recoiled. He stood up, stomped away, then turned on his heel. "I don't work in Sanctuary, you know that. It's bad enough, with everything that happened with Lord Torchholder's death, that my name is known. But a common tournament? I will not ."

"Shite! I understand!" Cauvin couldn't meet the other man's eyes. "That's why I'm putting my name in."

"You?! It's a steel tournament, pud. You can't even draw a sword properly. You're-" Soldt stopped, mid-rant, then finished in a far more thoughtful tone: "You're getting more like him every day."

Home Is Where the Hate Is

Mickey Zucker Reichert

A dense fog blurred the long-ruined temples of the Promise of Heaven and dimmed the early afternoon sunlight to a dusk-like gray. Light rain stung Dysan's face as he slouched along the Avenue of Temples that led to the shattered ruin he alone called home. The dampness added volume and curl to raven hair already too thick to comb. It fell to his shoulders in a chaotic snarl that he clipped only when it persistently fell into his eyes. Few bothered with this quarter of the city, though Dysan guessed it had once bustled with priests and their pious. In the ten years since Arizak and his Irrune warriors had destroyed the Bloody Hand of Dyareela and banished all but their own religion from the inner regions of Sanctuary, no one had bothered to pick up the desecrated pieces the Dyareelans had left of their former temples. Instead, the buildings fell prey to ten years of disrepair, beset by Sanctuary's infernal storms and soggy climate.

At sixteen, Dysan was only just beginning to learn his way around the city that bred, bore, and neglected to raise him. He recalled only flashes of his first four years, when he, his mother, and his brother, Kharmael, had lived in a hovel near the Street of Red Lanterns. Only in the last few years had he figured out what so many must have known all along: Kharmael's father, Ilmaris, the man Dysan had once blindly believed his own, had died three years before his birth. Their mother had supported them with her body. Dysan's father might be any man who had lived in or passed through Sanctuary, and his mother, in what the Rankans had proclaimed was the 86th year of their crumbling empire and the Ilsigis called the 3,553rd year of theirs.

Dysan flicked water from his lashes and wiped his dripping nose with the back of a grimy, tattered sleeve. He had managed to swipe a handful of bread and some lumps of fish from an unwatched stew pot, enough to fill his small belly. Tonight, he planned to use his meager store of wood to light a fire in the Yard-his name for the roofless two-walled main room of his home-beneath an overhang sheltered from the rain. It was a luxury he did not often allow himself. The flames sometimes managed to chase away the chill that had haunted his heart for every one of the ten years he had lived without his brother, but it was a bittersweet trade-off. Even small, controlled fires sometimes stirred flashbacks to the worst moments of his life.

Tears rose, unbidden, mingling with the rainwater dribbling down Dysan's face. Kharmael and the Dyareelans had raised him from a toddler to a child in a world of pain and blood that no one should ever have to endure. Lightning flashed, igniting the sky and a memory of a stranger: skinned and mutilated by laughing children trained to kill with cruel and guiltless pleasure. Dysan had personally suffered the lash of the whip only once. Small and frail, half the size of a normal four-year-old, he had passed out at the agony of the first strike. Only the scars that striped his shoulders and back, and the aches that had assailed him on awakening, made it clear that his lack of mental presence had not ended the torture. The Hand had labeled him as weak, a sure sacrifice to their blood-loving, hermaphrodite god/goddess; and he would have become one in his first few weeks had Kharmael not been there to comfort him, to rally and bully him, when necessary, into moving when he would rather have surrendered to whatever death the Hand pronounced.

Kharmael had been the survivor: large, strong, swarthy with health, and handsome with a magnificent shock of strawberry-blond hair inherited from their father. His father , Dysan reminded himself. Dysan had shared nothing with his brother but love and a mother, dead from a disease one of her clients had given her. Later, Dysan discovered, that same illness had afflicted him in the womb, the cause of his poor growth, his delicate health, and the oddities of his mind. Oddities that had proven both curse and blessing. Social conventions and small talk baffled him. He could not count his own digits, yet languages came to him with an eerie golden clarity that the rest of the world lacked. At first, his companions in the Pits, and the Hand alike, believed him hopelessly simple-minded. At five years old, he barely looked three; and only Kharmael could wholly understand his speech. It was the orphans who figured out that Dysan used words from the languages of every man who had come to visit his mother, of every child in the Pits, interchangeably, switching at random. But once the Hand heard of this ability, Dysan's life had irrevocably changed.

Dysan turned onto the crude path that led to his home, sinking ankle-deep into mud that sucked the last shreds of cloth from his reet. He would have to steal a pair of shoes or boots, or the money to buy them, before colder days set in. Already, the wind turned his damp skin to gooseflesh; his sodden hair and the wet tatters of his clothing felt like ice when they brushed against him. But the thought of shopping sent a shiver through Dysan that transcended cold. No matter how hard he tried, counting padpols confounded him. Most thieves would celebrate the discovery of something large and silver, "Ut he dreaded the day his thieving netted him a horde of soldats °r shaboozh. He could never figure out how to change it or spend it, and it would taunt him until some better thief relieved him of the burden.