Hanse pounced after it, all wiry and cat-lithe and dark.
He retrieved the knife, giving his wrist the little twist that plucked forth an inch of flat blade from bossed wood capable of withstanding a good ax-blow. Almost distractedly he slipped it back into its sheath up his right arm.
Hanse half-turned to flash teeth at his teacher-at-arms but not at knife throwing, and he saluted. Then he turned and faded around the building and was gone, although the sun was still orangey-yellow and the late-day shadows only thinking about gathering to provide him his natural habitat.
"Shadowspawn," Niko muttered, and went to retrieve his shield and seek out Tempus. Deliver me from this insolent Ilsigi in his painful youth, Tempus? Take away this bitter cup you have had me lift, and lift to my lips, and Irft?
Hanse moved away, wearing a tight little smile that really did not enhance his looks.
He was proud. Pleased with himself. Too, he liked Niko. There was no way he could not, and not respect him too, just as there was (almost, at least) no way he could admit or show it.
He had let Tempus know he liked him while claiming to care about no one, and had gone and got him out of the dripping hands of that swine, Kurd. Kurd the vivisectionist. One who sectioned, who sliced, the vibrantly living. Tempus, for instance. Among others.
After the horror of the house of Kurd, Hanse was an uncharacteristically pensive fellow; a different Hanse. The eeriness of a regenerated Tempus was almost more than he could bear. Immortal! 0 gods of us all-immortal, a human newt who survived all and healed all and regrew even vivisectioned parts-scarless!
Nor had that enigmatic and ever-scornful immortal said aught concerning Hanse's expenses in freeing him, or his promise to retrieve a certain set of laden moneybags from a certain well up on Ea-a certain place.
Oh, it had cost.
For weeks Hanse had been idle. He did nothing. No; he did do something; he drank. His income stopped. He even sold some of his belongings to buy the unwatered wine he had always avoided.
Even so he did not sell the gift of a dead Stepson; an entirely mortal one. It hung now on the wall of Hanse's lodgings: a fine, fine sword in a silvered sheath. He would not wear it. He would not touch it. Only he was sure that it was not the gift of that dead man but of a god. Tempus's god, Who had spoken to Hanse and rewarded him for his rescue of His servant Tempus-as that god, Vashanka, had promised.[i]
That sword hung, minus its silver sheath, on Hanse's wall. The scabbard trailed down his right leg. It was wrapped all in dull black leather, knotted and pegged and knotted again. Nor was he one with the mercenaries cluttering the city, bullying the city, and he had no wish to be.
Hanse had another need for becoming proficient with arms, and better than proficient. It was Hanse's secret, and it was bigger than Sanctuary itself.
He collected from Tempus, though not in coin. That immortal had offered to make him a bladesman. (As for the horse . . . well, it was something of value and prestige, at least. Horses and Hanse were not friends and he hoped never never to fight from the back of one. But for a horse, he'd be rich!)[ii]
Tempus did not know why Hanse had changed his mind and sent word that he was minded to learn swordsmanship. He was pleased, Hanse was sure of that. Just as he and his ego were sure that he must be the best student Niko had ever had. Already, he was sure, he was incredibly good. Hanse never needed the same instruction twice. He never repeated an error. He was good. Niko said so, and Niko spoke for Tem-pus.
Leaving Niko now, the thief called Shadowspawn wore a tight little smile. It was the pleased smile of one on whom a god has smiled; a pleased but enigmatic smile. He says that I am good.
I hope so, Vashanka's minion, he mused. Oh, I hope so. And I hope Vashanka finds me better than good!
Hanse wended home, compact and lithe and darkly menacing, weighted with blades at leg and hips and arms. There were those who were in the act of departing this place or that but waited within doorways until he had passed; there were those who stepped aside for him though he made no hostile move. They did not like it, or like themselves for doing it, but they would do it again, for this menacing street-tough.
Hanse went home. I'm ready, he thought, and tight-smiled.
After that business with Kurd and with Tempus and the absolute ghastliness of Tempus's mutilations-and the ghastlier reality of his complete recovery even unto regrowing several parts-Hanse had taken to drink.
He was not a drinker. Never had been. That was no deterrent to millions of others and it was not to Shadowspawn. So he drank. He drank to find an alternate state, an alternate reality, and he succeeded admirably in achieving the unad mirable.
The problem was that he did not like that. Getting away from everything was getting away from Hanse, and Hanse was the poor wight he was trying to find.
0 Cudget, if only they had not slain you-you'd have shown me and told me as always, wouldn't you?
(Put another way, he had been shaken badly and dived for solace into a lake of alcohol. He stayed there, and he was drunk quite a lot of the time. He didn't like that either; he didn't even like the taste of the stuff. Most especially he didn't like the way he felt when sleep stopped his body and let it awake with a mouth like vinegar and the desert all at once, a mouth with the feel of a public restroom for horses and a tongue in need of a curry-comb and a stomach he'd willingly have traded for a plate of pigs' trotters and a head he'd have traded for nearly anything at all. Something had come loose in there and was rolling around, and it banged against the inside of his head when he moved it. Alcohol helped. More scales off the snake that had bit him. That merely started the whole process again. Besides, he preferred control, control or some feeling of it. Strong drink washed that away on a river of vomit and sank it with explosive belches and retching.
(He had the need for control, back there in the barely lighted shadows of his mind. All dark, back in there, in the mind of the bastard son from the wrong side of everything. He had never been in control, and so sought it, or its semblance. He had no need for any drug, and now he knew he had no desire for it either. Not to mention head or stomach.
(That was that. Hanse was off the sauce.)
He returned to being what most others were, certainly most who were his age: a creature of his own subconscious, a stranger dwelling within him, and he lived as its captive.
One day someone mentioned his "obvious sense of honor"-and it was obvious-as he put it. Learned, that fellow said, from Hanse's respected mentor Cudget Swearoath, master thief. And Shadowspawn sneered and looked menacing. That the innocent spewer of insults offered to buy him a drink did not advance his cause or Hanse's mental state in the least measure. The poor fellow soon remembered an important appointment elsewhere, well apart from Hanse, and he repaired there at speed. Hanse predictably spent the rest of that day behaving as if he had no notion what honor might be.
And still he sought, and remembered.
"Thou shalt have a sword," that voice had said inside his head, a lion agrowl in the shadowed corridors of his mind, "if thou free'st my valued and loyal ally. Aye, and a fine sheath for it, as well. In silver!"
Hanse knew fear and some anger; he wanted nothing of that incestuous god of Ranke, for it had to be Vashanka whom Tempus served close. No? I serve-I mean... I do not... No? Tempus is my... my... I go to aid a fr-a man who might help me, he tried to tell that god in his mind, for he admitted to no friends and had sworn to Tempus that he had none and wanted none. He who had friends was vulnerable, and Hanse much preferred his image of himself as a separate room, a person apart, an island.