Robert Asprin - Shadow Of Sanctuary

And then the door was open above him, and he was lying sprawled on his back head downwards on the narrow steps, looking up through his feet at Mradhon Vis, who came with the metal flash of a dagger in his fist.

Hanse went for the belt knife, curled up and threw it with all he had: Mradhon Vis staggered back with an oath, spun half about by the cast as Hanse twisted to get up, his feet higher than his head with a railing on his left and a wall on his right, which hindered more than helped. He got as far as his knee when the bravo's foot caught him under the jaw and hurled him back into the wall; and a knife followed - further humiliation - up against his throat while Mradhon Vis grabbed his hair and twisted. Hanse fought to get loose; he thought that he struggled, but the messages were slow getting to his limbs, and the burning of the amulet at his throat distracted him with the feeling that he was choking or was it the knife?

'Bring him up,' a female voice said from the light of the doorway; and Hanse looked blurrily up into it, while a hand twisted into his hair jerked him up and the dagger shifted a keen point to his back under the ribs. He went up the stairs, and followed the blackrobed figure which retreated inside. There seemed little else at the moment that he could do, that he wanted to do, bruised as he was and with his wits leaden weighted. He blinked in the interior light, stared dully at the russet silks, at the clutter of objects separately beautiful, but which lay disarrayed - like bones in a nest, he thought distantly, thinking of something predatory; and he jerked at the sudden racket and nutter of wings, a fluttering of the lamplight in the commotion of a great black bird which sat on its perch over against the wall.

'You can go,' the woman said, and Hanse's heart lifted for the instant. 'You've been paid. Come back tomorrow.' And then he knew she spoke to Mradhon Vis.

'Tomorrow.'

'Then.'

'Is that all there is? And leave this here?' A jab at Hanse's back. 'I took a knife, woman; I've got a hole in my arm and you keep this and turn me out in the wet, do you?'

'Out,' she said, in a lower tone.

And to Hanse's bewilderment the knife retreated. Hanse moved then, turned in the instant, thinking of a quick stab from behind, his own hand to his wrist sheath ... and he had the blade out, facing Mradhon Vis - but somehow the rest of the move failed him, and he watched dully as Mradhon Vis turned away and sulked his way to the open door.

'Close it behind you,' the woman said, and Mradhon Vis did so, not slamming it. Hanse blinked, and the amulet at his neck hurt more than any bruise he had taken. It burned, and he had no sense left to get rid of it.

Ischade smiled abstractedly at her guest, left him so a moment, having greater business at hand. 'Peruz,' she said softly, shook back her hood, and taking from her robes the necklace, she drew near the huge raptor ... or the guise it wore. With the greatest of care she slipped the necklace into a small case which hung from the side of the stand and fastened the case in its turn to the scaly leg of the bird. Peruz stood still too, uncommonly so, his great wings folded. A last time she teased the breast feathers, the softness about the neck - she had grown fond of the creature in recent weeks, as anything that shared her life. She smiled at the regard of a cold topaz eye.

'Open the window,' she instructed her intruder/guest, and he moved, slowly, with the look of a man caught in a bad dream. 'Open it,' and he did so. She launched Peruz and he flew, with a clap of wings, a hurtling out towards the dark, a lingering coolness of wind.

So he was sped. Her employer had all he had paid to have - and well paid. And she was alone. She let go her mental grip on the ruffian ... and at once his face showed panic and he whipped up the knife he had in hand. She stopped that. He looked confused, as if he had quite forgotten what the dagger was doing in his hand. And that effort would cost her, come the morning: on the morrow would be a fearful headache and a mortal lassitude, so that she would want to do nothing for days but drowse. But now the blood was still quick in her veins, the excitement lingered, and in the threat of ennui and solitude which followed any completed task ... she felt another kind of excitement, and looked on her uninvited visitor knowing, quite knowing that at such times she was mad, and what it cost to cure such madness for the time...

Attractive. Her tastes were broad, but in that curiously com-partmented mind of hers, it pleased her ... the mission done ... that there was room for Mradhon to go. Here stood instead an unmissable someone - he had all the marks of that condition. It was justice owed her for her pains ... twice as sweet when it all came together just as it did now, her satisfaction and the last untidy threads of a business, tied together and nipped short.

She held out her hand and came closer, feeling that sweet/sad warmth that sex set into her blood ... and had felt it, at every weakening moment, from the time she had robbed the wrong wizard and left him living. In the morning she would even feel some torment for it, a tangled regret: the handsome ones always left her with that, a sense of beauty wasted. But for the moment reason was quite gone.

And there had been so many before.

Hanse still held the knife and could not feel it; then heard the distant shock it made hitting the floor. There was no pain of the bruises, no sensation but of warmth and of the woman's nearness, her dark eyes regarding him, her perfume enveloping him. And the amulet at his throat, which gave off a bitter cold: that was the one last focus of his discomfort. She put her arms about his neck and her fingers found the chain. 'You don't want this,' she said, lifting it ever so gently over his head. He heard it fall, far, far away. Truth, he did not want it. He wanted her. It came to him that this was the way that Sjekso had gone, before he had ended up dead and cold outside the Unicorn, and it failed to matter. Her lips pressed his and oh, gods, he wanted her.

The floor wavered, and a wind swept in, laden with sweetish incense...

'Pardon me,' Enas Yorl said, and the couple on the verge of further intimacies broke apart, the woman staring at him wide-eyed and Shadowspawn with a hazy desperation. The russet silks in the room still billowed with the draught he had set up.

'Who are you?' the woman Ischade asked, and at once Enas Yorl felt a small trial of his defences, which he shrugged off. Ischade's expression at once took on a certain wariness.

'Let him go,' Enas Yorl said with a back-handed wave towards Shadowspawn. 'He's admirably discreet. And I'd take it kindly. - Go on, Shadowspawn. Now. Quickly.'

Shadowspawn edged towards the door, hesitated there, with a look of violated sanity.

'Out,' Enas Yorl said.

The thief spun about and opened the door, a fresh gust of wind.

And fled.

Hanse hit the stairs running, hardly pausing for the steps, never saw the figure loom up at the bottom until he was headed straight down at the knife that aimed at his gut.

He knocked the attacking blade aside and grabbed for arms or clothes, whatever he could hold, fell, in the shock of the collision, tumbled with the attacker and the blade, and lost his purchase in the impact with the ground. He hit on his back, desperately got a grip on the descending knife hand with Mradhon Vis's face coming down on him with a weight of body a third again his own. It was his left hand he used on the descending arm, left hand, knife hand, involved with that, and his battered muscles shook under the strain while he plied his unaccustomed right hand trying to reach the knife strapped to his leg. His left arm was buckling.

Suddenly Vis's weight shifted rightwards and came down on him, pinning his other arm - a limp weight, and in the space Vis's grimace had occupied, most improbably, Cappen Varra stood with a barrel stave in both his hands.