Robert Asprin - Shadow Of Sanctuary

He considered the weight in his palm, heavy as with gold. 'I'll find it,' he said, and, less than confident of the situation at hand: 'Are you sure you don't want me to stay about?'

Black brows drew together, a frown uncommonly grim. 'I have no doubts to my safety. - Ah, your name, sir. When I pay, I like to know that.'

'Vis. Mradhon Vis.'

'From-'

'Northward. A lot of places.'

'We'll talk. Tomorrow morning. Go on, now. Believe me, that the quarrel wasn't what it seemed.'

'Lady,' he murmured - he had known polite company once. He clenched the purse in his fist and turned off in the direction she had named - not without a backward look. Sjekso still waited where he had fixed himself against the wall; but the lady seemed to know he would look back, and turned a shadowy look on him.

Mradhon moved on quickly and further along the winding way, stopped and anxiously shook out the purse into his hand, a spill of five heavy pieces in gold and half a dozen of silver. Hot and cold went through him, like the shock of a blow, a tremor through things that were ... A second glance back, but buildings had come between him and the woman and her bought-boy Sjekso. Well, he had hired to stranger folk and no few worse to look on. He gave a twitch of his shoulders at that proceedings back there and shrugged it off. There was gold in his possession, a flood of gold. His gallantry had come from his own poverty, from one look at the woman's fine clothing and a sure knowledge that Sjekso Kinzan was all hollow when pushed. And for that gold in his hand he would have waited in the alley all night, or beaten Sjekso to fine rags, no questions asked.

It occurred to him while he went that it might involve more than that, but he went, all the same.

The woman looked back at Sjekso and smiled, a fervid smile which made wider and wider chaos of Sjekso's grasp of the situation. He stood away from his wall and - sobered as he had been in the encounter, deprived of the vaporous warmth of the wine in his blood - still he recovered something of anticipation, re estimated his own considerable animal charm in the light of the lady's sultry dark eyes, in the moonlike gleam of the gold coin she held up before him. He grinned, his confidence restored, stood. easier still as she came to him - it might have been the wine after all, this new blush of heat; it might have been her slim fingers which touched at his collar and drew a line with the edge of the coin down among the fine hairs of his chest, disturbing there the chain of the luckpiece he wore.

His luck had improved, he reckoned, laying it all to his way with women. She had liked it after all... they all did; and she might be parted from more than a golden coin, and if she thought of using him and that bastard northerner one against the other, good: there was a chance of paying off Mradhon Vis. He had skills the northerner did not; and he knew how to get the most out of them. He took most of his living from women, in one way or the other.

'What's your name?' she asked him.

'Sjekso Kinzan.'

'Sjekso. I have a place ... not the lodgings where I sent that fellow; that's business. But my real house... near the river. A little wine, a soft bed ... I'll bet you're good.'

He laughed. 'I make it a rule never to go out of my own territory till I know the terms. Here's good enough. Right over here. And I'll bet you don't care.'

'Mine's Ischade,' she murmured distractedly, as he put his hands up under the robes. She swayed against him, her own hands on him, and he found the coin and took it from her unresisting fingers. She brushed his lips with her own and urged him on. 'My name's Ischade.'

2

A corpse was no uncommon sight in the Maze. But one sprawled in the middle of the Serpentine, in the first light of the sun - the potboy of the Unicorn found the blond male corpse when he came out to heave the slops, a corpse on the inn's very doorstep, a body quite stiff and cold, and he knew Sjekso Kinzan. He spun on his heel and started to run back in - thought again and darted, back to search for valuables ... after all, some less acquainted and deserving person might come along. He found the brass luckpiece, found the purse ... empty, except for an old nail and a bit of lint - dropped the luckpiece down his own collar, jumped up and ran inside in breathless haste, to spill his news to the morning's first stirrers-forth in the tavern; and the fact of one of the Unicorn's regular patrons lying stiff at the door brought a stamping up and down the stair and a general outpouring of curious and half-awake ovemighters.

That was how it came to Hanse, a disturbance under Minsy Zithyk's rented window next door.

The gathering around the body in the street was solemn ... partly a kind of respect and partly morning headaches, more and more onlookers arriving as the commotion became its own reason for being. Hanse was one of the first, stood with his arms clenched into a tight fold - he had his daggers: had them about his person natural as breathing. His scowl and awakened-owl stare at the corpse of Sjekso Kinzan, his arms about his ribs holding his spine stiff- warned Minsy Zithyk off. She stood snuffling and holding her own ribs, doubtless with the other half of a throbbing headache. Hanse wanted no hanging-on, now, of Sjekso's longtime woman. The dice game and the wager stuck in his mind and he felt eyes on him, himself part of the morning's gossip, with a man he had diced with lying cold in the soiled stream of a drain.

'Who got him?' Hanse asked finally, and there was a general shrugging of shoulders. 'Who?' Hanse snapped, looking round at the onlookers. A corpse was indeed no novelty in the Maze, but an otherwise young and healthy one, with no mark of violence on it... but a man on the doorstep of the tavern he frequented, a turn or two of the alleys to his own lodgings ...

There were amenities like territory. A man was never assured ... but there were places and places, and when he was in his own place, he was least likely to end up among the morning's debris. There were stirrings among the crowd, discomfort - with Hanse, for one, whose smallish size meant a temper backed with knives, a bad reputation for every kind of mischief.

And his sullen, headachy stare passed right round to a stranger in the territory - to one Mradhon Vis; to a new and frequent patron at the Unicorn. 'You,' Hanse said. 'You left about the same time last night. You see anything?'

A shrug. A useless question. No one in the Maze saw anything. But Vis looked too thin-lipped about the shrug and Hanse looked back with a blacker stare still had sudden awareness of the silence of the crowd when he spoke, of eyes on him; and he unfolded his arms and thought of how they had jostled in a doorway last night, Sjekso and Mradhon Vis, and Sjekso had laughed and acted his usual flippant self at Vis's expense. Hanse drew quiet conclusions - quiet because he cut a mean figure at the moment, having got off with a dead man's last cash and last pleasure ... he swept a glance about at faces dour with their own private conclusions. No love lost on him or dead Sjekso; but Sjekso being local and dead was the focus of pity, while regarding himself- there was quite another thing in the air.

Vis started to leave, edging away through the crowd. "That's the one to look at,' Hanse said. 'Hey, you! You don't like the questions, do you? The garrison threw you out, hey? You come back here, whoreson coward, you don't turn your back on me.'

'He's crazy,' Vis said, stopped behind an unwilling screen of onlookers who were trying to melt in all directions, but Mradhon kept with the migrating cover. 'Figure who got his money and his woman,, you figure that and wonder who did for him, that's who...'

Hanse went for the knives. 'Wasn't no mark on him,' a youngish voice was shrilling. The crowd was swinging wildly out of the interval Vis was busy preserving. Minsy yelled, and several strong and larger arms wound themselves into Hanse's elbows and about his middle. He heaved and kicked to no use while Mradhon Vis, in the clear, straightened his person and his clothing.