Robert Asprin: Shadow Of Sanctuary

'You are speaking to me, man,' Quartz said, using the word with as much contempt as he had put into 'woman'. 'I have but one more question for you. You are not ill-favoured, yet you cannot get someone to bed you for the joy of it. Does this mean you are diseased?'

With an incoherent sound of rage, he reached for his knife. Before he touched it. Quartz's short-sword rasped out of its scabbard. She held its tip just above his belt-buckle. The death she offered him was slow and painful.

Everyone in the tavern watched intently as the man slowly spread his hands.

'Go away,' Quartz said. 'Do not speak to me again. You are not unattractive, but if you are not diseased you are a fool, and I do not sleep with fools.'

She moved her sword a handsbreadth. He backed up three fast steps and spun around, glancing spasmodically from one face to another, to another. He found only amusement. He bolted, through a roar of laughter, fighting his way to the door.

The tavern-keeper sauntered over. 'Foreigners,' he said, 'I don't know whether you've made your place or dug your graves tonight,

but that was the best laugh I've had since the new moon. Bauchle Meyne will never live it down.'

'I did not think it funny in the least,' Quartz said. She sheathed her short sword. She had not even touched her broadsword. Wess had never seen her draw it. 'And I am tired. Where is our room?'

He led them up the stairs. The room was small and low-ceilinged. After the tavern-keeper left, Wess poked the straw mattress of one of the beds, and wrinkled her nose.

'I've got this far from home without getting lice, I'm not going to sleep in a nest of bedbugs.' She threw her bedroll to the floor. Chan shrugged and dropped his gear.

Quartz flung her pack into the comer. 'I'll have something to say to Satan when we find him,' she said angrily. 'Stupid fool, to let himself be captured by these creatures.'

Aerie stood hunched in her cloak. 'This is a wretched place,' she said. 'You can flee, but he cannot.'

'Aerie, love, I know,.I'm sorry.' Quartz hugged her, stroking her hair. 'I didn't mean it, about Satan. I was angry.'

Aerie nodded.

Wess rubbed Aerie's shoulders, unfastened the clasp of her long hooded cloak, and drew it from Aerie's body. Candlelight rippled across the black fur that covered her, as sleek and glossy as sealskin. She wore nothing but a short thin blue silk tunic and her walking boots. She kicked off the boots, dug her clawed toes into the splintery floor, and stretched.

Her outer fingers lay close against the backs of her arms. She opened them, and her wings unfolded.

Only half-spread, her wings spanned the room. She let them droop, and pulled aside the leather curtain over the tall narrow window. The next building was very close.

'I'm going out. I need to fly.' .

'Aerie, we've come so far today -'

'Wess, I am tired. I won't go far. But I can't fly in the daytime, not here, and the moon is waxing. If I don't go now I may not be able to fly for days.'

'It's true,' Wess said. 'Be careful.'

'I won't be gone long.' She slid sideways out of the window and climbed up the rough side of the building. Her claws scraped into the adobe. Three soft footsteps overhead, the shushh other wings; she was gone.

The others pushed the beds against the wall and spread their blankets, overlapping, on the floor. Quartz looped the leather flap over a hook in the wall and put the candle on the window-ledge.

Chan hugged Wess. 'I never saw anyone move as fast as Lythande. Wess, love, I feared he'd killed you before I even noticed him.'

'It was stupid, to speak so familiarly to a stranger.'

'But he offered us the nearest thing to news of Satan we've heard in weeks.'

'True. Maybe the fright was worth it.' Wess looked out of the window, but saw nothing of Aerie.

'What made you think Lythande was a woman?'

Wess glanced at Chan sharply. He gazed back at her with a mildly curious expression.

He doesn't know, Wess thought, astonished. He didn't realize -

'I... I don't know,' she said. 'A silly mistake. I made a lot of them today.'

It was the first time in her life she had deliberately lied to a friend. She felt slightly ill, and when she heard the scrape of claws on the roof above, she was glad for more reasons than simply that Aerie had returned. Just then the tavern-keeper banged on their door announcing their bath. In the confusion of getting Aerie inside and hidden under her cloak before they could open the door, Chan forgot the subject of Lythande's gender.

Beneath them, the noise of revelry in the Unicorn gradually faded to silence. Wess forced herself to lie still. She was so tired that she felt as if she were trapped in a river, with the current swirling her around and around so she could never get her bearings. Yet she could not sleep. Even the bath, the first warm bath any of them had had since leaving Kaimas, had not relaxed her.

Quartz lay solid and warm beside her, and Aerie lay between Quartz and Chan. Wess did not begrudge Aerie or Quartz their places, but she did like to sleep in the middle. She wished one of her friends were awake, to make love with, but she could tell from their breathing that they were all deeply asleep. She cuddled up against Quartz, who reached out, in a dream, and embraced her.

The darkness continued, without end, without any sign of dawn, and finally Wess slid out from beneath Quartz's arm and the blankets, silently put on her pants and shirt, and, barefoot, crept down the stairs, past the silent tavern, and outside. On the doorstep, she sat and pulled on her boots.

The moon gave a faint light, enough for Wess. The street was deserted. Her heels thudded on the cobblestones, echoing hollowly against the close adobe walls. Such a short stay in the town should not make her uneasy, but it did. She envied Aerie her power to escape, however briefly, however dangerous the escape might be. Wess walked down the street, keeping careful track of her path. It would be very easy to get lost in this warren of streets and alleys, niches and blank canyons.

The scrape of a boot, instantly stilled, brought her out of her mental wanderings. They wished to try to follow her? Good luck to them.

Wess was a hunter. She tracked her prey so silently that she killed with a knife; in the dense rain forest where she lived, arrows were too uncertain. She had crept up on a panther and stroked its smooth pelt - then vanished so swiftly that she left the creature yowling in fury and frustration, while she laughed with delight. She grinned, and quickened her step, and her footfalls turned silent on the stone.

Her unfamiliarity with the streets hampered her slightly. A dead-end could trap her. But she found, to her pleasure, that her instinct for seeking out good trails translated into the city. Once she thought she would have to turn back, but the high wall barring her way had a deep diagonal fissure from the ground to its top. She found just enough purchase to clamber over it. She jumped into the garden the wall enclosed, scampered across it and up a grape arbour, and swung down into the next alley.

She ran smoothly, gladly, as her exhaustion lifted. She felt good, despite the looming buildings and twisted dirty streets and vile odours.

She faded into a shadowed recess where two houses abutted but did not line up. Listening, she waited.

The soft and nearly silent footsteps halted. Her pursuer hesitated. Grit scraped between stone and leather as the person turned one way, then the other, and, finally, chose the wrong turning and hurried off. Wess grinned, but she felt respect for any hunter who could follow her this far.

Moving silently through shadows, she started back towards the tavern. When she came to a tumbledown building she remembered, she found finger- and toe-holds and climbed to the roof of the next house. Flying was not the only talent Aerie had that Wess envied. Being able to climb straight up an undamaged adobe wall would be useful sometimes, too.