Robert Asprin - Shadow Of Sanctuary

They turned, not the way he had anticipated, towards the lodgings he had been watching, but the other way, towards the Serpentine. Hanse swore and slipped out from his concealment, shadowed them most carefully in their course through the debris of the alley and out on to the street. The moon was not yet up; the only light came from the city itself, a vague glimmering on a bank of fog towards the harbour which diffused across the sky and promised one of those nights in which light spread through milky mist, from whatever sources - a thieves' night, and a worse to come.

The pair tended on up the Serpentine, bold as dockside whores ... but odd sights were common enough in the Maze by night, masks, cloaks, bright colours flaunted by night when the kindly dark masked the signs of wear and their threadbare condition. Man and woman, they were only conspicuous by their plainness, the woman shrouded by the robe and hood so that she might be instead some night prowling priest with an unlikely and rough guard.

Hanse followed, in and out among the occasional walkers on the street, a kind of stalking at which he had some skill.

*

... So, well, it answered, at least, what Hanse had been up to, and upset all Cappen Varra's calculations about Hanse as bluster and no threat. Cappen stopped at the corner with the trio in view, glanced over his own shoulder with a touch of mad humour and the desperate thought that the whole was getting to be a procession in the dark streets... the woman and Vis, and Hanse, and now himself but at least there was no fifth person that he could see, following him.

Hanse moved off, slipping casually down the street amid the ordinary traffic with a skill Cappen found amazing ... he had never seen Hanse work, not after this fashion; had never particularly wanted to think at depth on the essence of the smallish thief, that there was in fact something more than the temper and the knives and the vanity which made this man dangerous. Having seen it, he reckoned to himself that the only sensible course for him now was to go back into the Unicorn, work his way into whatever game might start - his current hope of prosperity - and forget Hanse entirely, never minding a moment when Hanse turned up as stiff and cold as Sjekso had, which was assuredly where he was headed at the moment. But perhaps it was the poetry of the matter, the suspicion that there might be something worth the witnessing ... perhaps it was the assurance that Hanse was into far more than he knew, and that somewhere up there, without untidy recourse to the rapier that swung at his side ... he might overtake the revenge-bound lunatic and talk him out of it. Hanse-was the only likely ally in a situation of his own; the woman had looked at him back there, and there was nagging at him an unwelcome vision, Hanse lying at the doorstep in the morning and himself there the day after - macabre fancy it might be, but the wind still blew up his back. There was only the matter of catching Hanse to stop him, and that was like putting one's hands on a shadow. Cappen was not accustomed to feel awkward in his moves, looked down on the louts and ne'er-do wells who walked the Maze; possessed a grace surpassing most - in any situation.

But not in walking the Maze by dark and unseen. Hanse was in his element, and Cappen followed him artlessly, down the length of the Serpentine, and into territory of the city at large - where the law came, and where a wanted thief was less than safe. The houses and shops here were more sturdy, and finally magnificent, and those latter existed behind walls, and most with bars on the windows. Walkers grew scarce for a time, and Cappen hung further back, afraid that he himself might attract the notice of the pair Hanse followed ... which he earnestly did not want.

One street and another, and sometimes a passage through narrower ways where Cappen found Hanse going more carefully, where they four were virtually alone and where a false move could alert the pair ahead. Cappen stayed far back then, and once he thought he had lost them all... but a quick move around a comer put them all in view again. Hanse looked back in that instant, while Cappen tried to stay inconspicuously part of a stack of barrels, recalling Hanse's knives, and the murk of the night. The fog was coming on and the light played tricks; a light mist slicked the stones ... and still the pair kept moving, out of the merchant quarter and into the quarter of the gods, past the square of the Promise of Heaven, where prostitutes, bedraggled in the mist, sat their accustomed benches like rain-soaked birds. - They swung past this place and into the Avenue of Temples itself; and Cappen shrugged his cloak about him with a genuinely wretched chill and marvelled at the trio ahead, who moved, pursued and pursuer, with such a tireless purpose.

And then another alley, a sudden move aside, which almost caught Hanse himself by surprise, near the magnificence of the dome of the temple of Ils and Shipri.

There Hanse tucked himself away into shadow and Cappen quite lost sight of him, among the buttresses and the statuary of the out-thrust wing of the temple ... vanished.

Then the woman in black went out into the street, ascended the plain centre of the steps of Ils and Shipri, towards the temple guards who warded the constantly open doors in these uneasy times ... four men and well armed, setting hands on hilts at once as they were approached. The woman cast back her hood: swords stayed undrawn, hands unmoving, numb as the patrons of the Unicorn.

Then another shadow began to move, from the unwatched side of the steps, a man from out of the shadows, knife in hand, a swift stalking... which afforded Cappen even less of comfort and made him think that a wayward minstrel perhaps should have spent a safer, drier night in the Unicorn.

Follow, the wizard had said, and Hanse pressed himself close against the wall, in the scant shadow afforded by a bit of brickwork, pressed himself there and watched in chill discomfort -blinked in horror while it happened, and four men died with swords still in sheath - only the last attempted a defence, and Mradhon Vis cut his throat in one quick and unmistakable move. Hanse blinked again and discovered to his consternation that the dark one, the woman, was gone, Mradhon Vis crouching now in sole possession of that bloody threshold. Hanse fingered his belt knife like a warding talisman; and wanted only to stay put, but all the while the icy cold at the pit of his neck, more biting than the cold of the mist, reminded him what he was there to do - what other power there was to offend. And he waited, reckoning every small move Mradhon Vis made, crouched over the bodies of the guards - every small shifting of a man busy at corpse-looting, every glance about as some hardy passerby noised along the main avenue - but none saw, none came near.

The woman delayed about her business inside: it might have been a moment, or far longer - time did tricks in his mind. Hanse shifted uneasily, finally gathered his nerve, slipped out of that safe concealment and, in the turning of Vis's head towards a distraction on the street... he eased past a gap in cover and into the alley Vis and the woman had left, along the temple itself.

He reached the first of three barred windows, and with utmost silence took the chance and seized the bars, hoisted himself up to see. The breath passed silently over his teeth and his gut knotted up - a robber of wizards, Enas Yorl had said: and now a thief who preyed on gods.

That struck hard ... not that he darkened the doorway of his city gods with his presence or practised alms; but there were territories, there were limits to a thief's audacity ... or it went hard for all. It was his craft, by the gods, his art the woman involved; and they were old, those gods, and belonged in Sanctuary, as the Rankan emperor's new lot never would. And the woman, the foreigner, the witch-thief, climbed up to the lap of bearded Ils himself and lifted the fabled necklace of Harmony from about the marble neck.