"A few timbers stove, but the Bey's folk, they got to them-the bodies, reverence-a dozen of them."
"In Sanctuary," Molin said with a pitying look at the Hell-Hound, "we notice a dozen bodies come dawn?"
"Two at Siphinos's door; one at Elinos's. Three at Agal-in's.... They're Nisi. Every one."
"Hey," someone yelled. "Hey-"
He was in the street; his horse under him. He blinked at the sun and the ordinary sights of Sanctuary and caught himself against the saddlebow, staring down at the man who had stopped his horse, a common tradesman. There was a buzz of consternation about. Dimly Strat understood the horse had gotten to some mischief with a produce cart. He stared helplessly at the old man who stared at him in a troubled way; Ilsigi-dark, and recognizing a Rankan lost and prey to anything that might happen to a man by day in Sanctuary streets.
Shingles lay scattered on the cobbles; a tavern sign hung by one ring; debris was everywhere. But trade went on. The bay horse was after apples.
He felt after his purse. It was gone; and he could not remember how. He would have flung the man a coin and paid the damage and forgotten the Wriggly entire; but they were all round him, men, women, silent in mutual embarrassment, mutual hate, and mutual helplessness.
"Sorry," he muttered, and took up the reins and got the horse away, slowly down the street.
Robbed-not of the money only. There were vast gaps in his memory-where he had been; what he had seen.
Roxane. Ischade. He had come back to the river-house. The memory got so far and stopped.
He touched his throat on reflex. You've always mistaken me, she'd said.
The sun was up. Tradesmen went bawling their wares, the housekeepers were out dusting off the steps.
He would have ridden from the gates and saved himself; but like the bay horse he had learned patterns and was caught in them, kept to the path and to duty.
I promised something, he thought in a chill, half-recovered memory.
Gods-what?
REBELS ARENT BORN IN PALACES by Andrew J. Offutt
Offer a prize for the lowest, skungiest dive in Sanctuary, and Sly's Place will win it hands down. That's a good place for hands at Sly's Place, too. Down, near your belt-purse and weapons. Sly's Place is sphinctered in the improbable three way intersection of Tanner and Odd Birt's Dodge and the north-south wriggle of the Serpentine (near Wrong-way Park). Those are "streets," to those who don't mind a certain looseness or downright ludicrousness in terminology, in that area of town called the Maze. 'Way back deep in the Maze, which is the lowest, skungiest hellhole in Sanctuary and probably on the continent, and let's don't talk about the planet.
Every Maze-denizen and most Downwinders know where Sly's Place is, and yet no one can assign a proper address to it. Its address is not that winding maze-link called the Serpentine. It isn't given as being on the streetlet called Tanner. And no one gives Odd Birt's Dodge as an address. Sly's Place is just there, at that sort of three-way comer, that preposterous intersection where that little Hanse-imitating cess-head Athavul got his comeuppance a couple of years ago, and where Menostric the Misadept, hardly sober and fleeing, slipped on a pile of human never-mind and actually skidded onto three streets before he came to an indecorous but appropriate stop in the gutter, sort of wrapped around the comer so that his head was up against the curbing on Tanner and his feet were actually in Wrong-way Park. It is also the area in which welled up so many disagreements swiftly escalating into encounters, sanguine fights, brawls, and worse that a physician named Alamanthis wisely rented space a couple of doors down on Tanner, and hired a mean ugly nondrinking bodyguard, and made street calls. He charged in advance, and slept most of each day, and was getting rich, damn and bless him.
Sly's Place! Name of Father Ils, Sly had taken dropsy and died three years agone, and the dive was still called Sly's Place because no one wanted to admit to owning it or to take responsibility either.
On the other hand, since all that Beyfishfacesin/sorcery problem in the Vulgar Unicorn and the pursuant edict and raid-or raid and edict; who in power could be bothered with niceties where anything in the Maze was concerned? -business waxed at Sly's like the tide when the moon is right, like the moon when the heavens are favorable, like the heavens when the gods are getting along. Someone had to be getting rich off Sly's Place, damn and bless him. Or her.
Sly's was where a pair of rebels/patriots met, and awaited the advent of an invited guest. In a town first occupied by those rank Rankans and then by the much ranker Stare-Eyes from oversea, rebels/patriots could not, after all, arrange such a meeting in some fine uptown place such as the Golden Oasis or Hari's Spot or even the Golden Lizard.
The two had been waiting quite a while and already one knife-fight had played absolute havoc with a winejar, two mugs, an innocent bysitter's pinky, a poorly made chair, and a kidney.
"Wish that little son-of-a-bitch would hurry up and get here," one said; his name was Zip and he had eyes that would look better on the other side of iron bars.
The other young man frowned, glancing distastefully at the mug on the table before him. "No call to say that-you don't even know who his mother is."
"Neither did his father, Jes."
Jes tried not to smile at that one, and shrugged. "Fine. Call him a bastard, then, and leave slurs to womanhood out of it."
"Lord, but you're sensitive."
"True."
Zip didn't say anything about the reflection on womanhood implicit in the very existence of bastard offspring, because he didn't think of it. His mind was not given to the formulation of such retorts, or much cleverness. He was a rebel and a fighter, not a thinker. On the other hand, he was the very hell of a patriot and rebel. His name was Zip and he had always thought quite a bit of a certain spawn of the shadows and tried to emulate him, until lately. Now he had lost respect for that one, but needed him.
"That's him," Zip said. "A bastard. Both by birth and by nature."
This time Jes went ahead and smiled. "That's pretty good. Zip. Oh-the barkeep's staring at us again." Jes's name was really Kama, and she was nothing at all like Zip except that tonight, like Zip, she was in disguise. Yet she had made one of those astonishing discoveries that come all unsuspected on unsuspecting people who might wish for better: she liked Zip, and she liked him more than somewhat.
"Oh, no. If I have to order another of those rotten cat-urine beers, I'll-ah. Here comes the son of a-the bast- here he comes now," he said, gazing past her. She didn't have to turn much to see the doorway; they had got themselves seated so as to be able to note who came in without seeming to show interest.
A step above the room, the doorway of Sly's Place was graced by thirty-one strands of dangling Syrese rope, each knotted thirty-one times in accord with that superstition. They hung just short of the oiled wooden flooring. Through that unlikely arras had just come a narrow lean wraith of a youthful man of average height, above-average presence, and a weening cockiness that showed in face and stance and carriage. Several years younger than Zip he was, and dressed all in black except for the (very) scarlet sash. His hair was blacker than black and seemed trying to decide whether to curl above almost-black eyes to make a person step aside while his own hair tried to curl. The falcate nose belonged on a young eagle. Good shoulders on him, and no hips worth mentioning.
His wearing of weapons was overdone the way a courtesan overdid her gems: as advertisement and braggadocio. Over the sash he wore a shagreen belt; from it a curved dagger swung at his left hip and an Ilbarsi knife, its blade twenty inches long or worse, on the right. The copper-set leather armlet that encircled his right upper arm was more than decoration: it housed a hiltless, guardless, long black lozenge of a throwing knife. So did the long bracer of black leather on that arm. More than one patron of Sly's Place knew that the decoration on his left buskin was the hilt of a knife sheathed within that soft boot. (They were wrong; he'd moved that sticker to the other buskin, and it didn't show.) Maybe he wore other blades and maybe he did not; there were rumors.