Robert Asprin: Stealers' Sky

Of course I'm worth it, but that's beside the point.

Shadowspawn ranged through Sanctuary like a hungry tiger on the prowl. And he could not find Tarkle.

Strick gazed across his blue-draped desk at the young woman there. From beneath a great mass of fiery hair that dribbled straggly red bangs over her brows and even eyes like an unkempt hedge, she stared anxiously back.

"I have interesting news for you," he told his visitor, whose name was Taya and whose scarlet mop of hair was a disguise, "from the princegovernor. He is without malice toward you. A small house and a guarantee of funds await you. They are sufficient to set you up in some business venture. You could also use it to leave Sanctuary, if you wish. This is genuine and only truth, Taya. As to my changing your appearance-yes, that is possible, but such a thing is not a matter of a few minutes and the Price may not please you. Meanwhile, you are best advised to go into hiding for a week or so. It is hardly what you're used to, but I'd recommend a room upstairs over the Vulgar Unicorn."

Her eyes had widened when he began, returned to something approaching normal as she took in his words, and now flared wide again. She flounced narrow and shapely shoulders. "That ... place?!"

The very big man spread his hands in a "why not?" gesture and his eyebrows said the same-he who looked like a swordshnger, a wealthy wizard's bodyguard, perhaps, and who was instead a wealthy wizard who was at the same time friend to prince and thief, Rankan noble and Ilsigi banker, carpenter and smith, whore and orange-peddler, He said, "Who's going to think of looking for you there?" She swallowed, stared at the close-fitting blue coif or hood without which no one had seen this man; she visibly considered, and at last nodded. "B-but I wouldn't dare even set foot in that-that ..."

"Careful, Taya," the spellmaster told her. "I own the place." He mirrored her nod. "The person waiting to see me right now will make the perfect guide, Taya. He will do it for me."

Two people sat in Strick's waiting area below. One, muffled in her costly shawl, was a mildly attractive noblewoman with a ghastly hairy wart erupting from her nose. Yes, Strick could and would deal with that, and be well paid for making her presentable again. The other, from whom she kept herself well clear, was an oldster with a voice out of a gravel pit. It was he that Strick's young assistant, Avenestra, beckoned to rise and follow, and he did, banging his staff as he walked. He was surprised to find someone else in Strick's office, and peered closely at her. Unusually keen of eye-especially at night-he recognized the softly weeping girl there with the white mage. She, meanwhile, glanced up at him and shrank at sight of wrinkled brown hands emerging from an old tan-once-brown robe with its hood all crumpled on his back and around his shoulders. His face was darkly shadowed by a funny feathered hat from some far place, doubtless to hide features ravaged by time and disease and even worse-if anything could be worse than time and disease to a very attractive young woman who had been concubine to the prince-governor from Imperial Ranke. Once-Imperial Ranke.

"Skarth," Strick said, "this is someone who needs to vanish in the Maze for a while."

The big hat nodded and its big bright yellow feather waggled tiredly. "She also resembles someone I once was so rude as to bind and gag in a certain bed in a certain large building!"

Taya gasped and looked at him sharply. He had entered with a limp, bearing a staff or cane in one of those dark, aged hands. Now she also saw an overdone black mustache, floppy as the feather and big and droopy as Strick's oversized blond mustache.

"Taya is in disguise. Taya, this man is in disguise. Please, just wait outside for a moment, will you? I need to impress on him the importance of his job in escorting you."

"Uh-oh, oh, all right," Taya said, who was accustomed to being asked to leave someone's presence and wait somewhere or other while more important things happened than a prince's mere bedwarmer, and hardly accustomed to thinking much for herself.

She rose, bulky and silly in yards and yards of S'danzo garb that hardly went with the lavishly proportioned red wig. The white mage's pneumatically overweight young assistantIreceptionistIfetch-and-carrier smiled at her and showed her along the corridor past that burly man who looked like a swordslinger, a wealthy mage's bodyguard, and was. Like the beyond-plump Avenestra, he wore garments of the color that had already come to be known as Strick blue.

"What'm I supposed to do with that?" the one called Skarth was meanwhile asking Strick. He gestured after Taya, Abruptly losing his limp, he paced with uncommon grace to lean on the back of the chair she had just vacated,

Across his blue-draped desk, the man all in blue told him.

"Uh." A withered old brown hand gestured. "No problem with that. Iffen any of these young jaybirds try to cock their combs at that fair young lass I'll whock 'em with my stick, I will!"

Strick winced. "Next time you consider a disguise that elaborate you might try to gain a lesson or a little advice from Feltheryn."

"Wh-oh, that actor? Not a bad idea, though. What did you find out about Tarkle?"

Strick sighed and looked morose. "Nothing, yet."

In an astonishingly young and vibrant voice for such an oldster, the man called Skarth said succinctly, "Shit."

"Wait." With a smallish smile twitching at his mouth, Strick dropped a small brown and yellow tiger-eye into the brown old hand.

"Glass," Skarth said in instant appraisal, and Strick laughed.

"True. But it's also today's message token. Hand it to Abohorr and ask him what you want to know. By tonight either he or Ahdio will know where Tarkle stays."

On the way out of Strick's, Skarth offered the ridiculously disguised girl his hand. She shrank away. She hustled along beside him, while he walked bent, rolling along like a sailor, clonking the hard-packed earth of the streets and "streets" with his staff.

She had one sentence of him as they made their way through a nice calm windless Sanctuary; Taya asked how it was that he was obviously of considerable age and yet his mustache was so black.

"Dye," Skarth said, from the throat. "The only way a S'danzo could have red hair."

Taya clamped her soft and sensuous lips and wasted no more words on so surly an escort.

When at last they entered the area called the Maze with its noise of yapping dogs and bustling, jostling people amid the odors of cooking and sweat and the ordure of yapping dogs, Taya shrank, bundling into herself and her acres of clothing. Someone jostled her hard and she sought Skarth's hand. He jerked it away.

"Clay might come off," he muttered in manner snarly, and led her on, on to that tavern with the laughably obscene sign featuring an impossible animal performing an impossible act upon itself.

Marype, apprentice to the master mage Markmor until the latter's timely demise, stood gazing down at the smallish pile of white ash in the bottom of a bowl of pure silver. The face of Marype was serene, brows up and eyes large and contemplative.

"You had a short and decent life but not too much fun of late, hmm, Marype?" he murmured. "Once I was out of the way you took over this fine palatial home of that slimy krrf-dealer trapped forever in un-life , . . tricked that doltish slut Amoli into helping you without knowing your master plan ... only to lose that old leech's earring to that most uncommon of common thieves' Next you showed my training well: actually succeeded in bringing me back to come up with an ingenious vengeance on that thief ... and yet got us both defeated by a gluemaker with a belly the size of the barrel of beer he must store in it. Demeaned and shamed me in the process ... and forced me to yield up my secret name to the gluemaker and those other two. In the event you wondered why, why as you felt your self leaving you, Marype; why, why I would take your body and leave you in mine and make sure that this time it is dead without possibility of return - . . well, that was it. To be demeaned and shamed by those three, to know they were laughing at us. Are laughing at us. That, darling apprentice, that I could not and cannot bear."