Lynn Abbey - Thieves World New Series 01 - Turning Points

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 447.33KB 169 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Thieves' World: Turning Points

Edited by Lynn Abbey

In memory of

Poul Anderson

Marion Zimmer Bradley

John Brunner

A. E. van Vogt

and

Gordon R. Dickson

Contents

LYNN ABBEY… Introduction

MICKEY ZUCKER REICHERT… Home Is Where the Hate Is

ANDREW OFFUTT…Role Model

DIANA L. PAXSON…The Prisoner in the Jewel

SELINA ROSEN…Ritual Evolution

DENNIS L. MCKIERNAN…Duel

ROBIN WAYNE BAILEY…Ring of Sea and Fire

JODY LYNN NYE…Doing the Gods' Work

LYNN ABBEY…The Red Lucky

JEFF GRUBB…Apocalypse Noun

RAYMOND E. FEIST…One to Go

LYNN ABBEY…Afterword

Introduction

Lynn Abbey

Cauvin thought he'd made himself froggin' clear: He was a work-ingman, a stonemason who liked the feel

of a heavy mallet in his hand, not some froggin' songbird caged up in the palace.

"He says he'll beat me, if you don't come," the stranger—a youth not out of his teens—insisted flatly,

desperately.

That didn't sound like Arizak perMizhur. Sanctuary's froggin' tyrant was a hard man, not a cruel or

vindictive one, or so Cauvin remembered. Cauvin had a thousand froggin' memories of Arizak

perMizhur, all of them clamoring for his attention. Problem was, almost none of those memories were his.

Five months earlier, on his way to smash some old bricks, he'd gotten his sheep-shite self caught up in the

death-wishes of Molin Torchholder, an old man who'd had his froggin' finger on every worthwhile pulse

in Sanctuary for a half-century. Everyone knew the froggin' Torch was a liar, a schemer, a hero, and the

priest of a vanquished god. What they hadn't known was that the old pud was a witch, too, and before

he breathed his froggin' last, he managed to cast all his lifetime's worth of memories into Cauvin's skull.

If he'd had the power, Cauvin would have summoned the Torch's shade and forced him to take back his

froggin' gift. If he'd had the power, which he didn't. Cauvin remembered the ways of witchcraft but he

couldn't do anything with them, not yet anyway. Along with his memories, the Torch had managed to

bequeath his god to Cauvin. Vashanka now skulked in Cauvin's dreams.

Cauvin could handle the memories and Vashanka's bitter prophecy. He'd survived a childhood on the

streets of Sanctuary and adolescence in the grasp of the Bloody Hand of Dyareela. He was a froggin'

master at ignoring the unignorable. But he wasn't the only one who knew about the Torch's legacy.

Arizak perMizhur knew it, too. Sanctuary's tyrant had relied upon the Torch's cunning to govern the city

his Irrune tribesmen had conquered ten years ago and would never understand. Arizak was getting old

himself and crippled by a rotting foot, but his mind remained sharp. He knew exactly how to get

Cauvin—and his inherited memories—moving.

"I'm off to the froggin' palace," Cauvin called across the stone-yard to his foster father, Grabar.

"Be careful," Grabar replied nicely, as if Cauvin's absence wouldn't wreak havoc on the day's labor.

Then again, why wouldn't Grabar bend over backward for him? Tucked away among all the Torch's

memories were the hundred-odd boltholes where the old pud had stashed his considerable wealth and

Sanctuary's treasures, beside. Shite for sure, with a little effort, Cauvin could have bought his foster father

out of the stoneyard. He could have bought himself a magnate's mansion fronting on the Processional or

resurrected one of the abandoned estates ringing the town, even the great Land's End estate of the exiled

Serripines. Frog all—Cauvin could have bought Arizak out of the palace—if he'd wanted any part of the

life that went with wealth.

Cauvin did have a clean shirt in his quarters over the shed where they stowed their tools and stabled the

mule, but pulling on a clean shirt halfway through a workday was just the sort of thing he refused to do.

He did pause by the water trough to sluice himself off. The water was breathtakingly frigid, but midway

through winter, it was water, not ice.

Sanctuary had had a few bitter days, but nothing like its usual winter. The old folks—older than

Grabar—who remembered before the Irrune, before the Bloody Hand of Dyareela, and all the way back

to the days when the Rankan Empire had thought to make something of this city stuck on its backside,

they whispered that magic must be returning to the city, as though the presence of a few wizards could

change the weather…

They once had, the Torch's memories rippled through Cauvin's mind. They might again. Be careful.

Cauvin shrugged away a dead man's thoughts and followed the youthful servant onto Pyrtanis street.

"Just so! Just so! You move now. Quick!"

Cauvin waited alone in the shadows of the audience chamber. The servant had melted into the tangled

corridors, first froggin' chance he got. Arizak sat in his cushioned chair at the center of the chamber—not

his usual place, which was on the dais at the rear. His bandaged and blanketed foot was propped up on

a separate, higher stool. He'd twisted sideways over his hip—a posture that had to be painful, though not

as painful as a slowly rotting limb. A servant stood behind him struggling with the butt end of a long spear

from which three lanterns—all lit and smoking—dangled.

The man doing the speaking, the mud-covered man in tattered fur and leather, was the tyrant's brother,

Zarzakhan, the Irrune's sole shaman. The way his mud shone in the lamplight, Zarzakhan was fresh from

a spirit walk with his god, Irrunega, and considering what the shaman mixed into his mud—blood, horse

dung, and stinkweed oil—Cauvin was froggin' glad to be upwind and watching as Zarzakhan seized

sixteen-year-old Raith, the most able of Ari-zak's sons and potential heirs, and stood him face-to-face

with an older Irrune warrior, whose back was to Arizak.

"See? See?" Zarzakhan chirped. "Tentinok blocks the sun. His shadow falls on Raith. The moon is

hidden from Tentinok's eyes."

From his chair, Arizak grunted and rearranged himself. Zarzakhan immediately grabbed Raith by the

shoulders again and guided him into a new position between Tentinok and Arizak, with his back to

Arizak. The shaman then spun Tentinok around to face both Raith and his father.

"Now, Raith blocks the sun and his shadow falls on Tentinok. For Tentinok, it was day, but becomes

night"—Zarzakhan gave Raith a shove that sent him staggering toward Cauvin—"then the shadow is

gone. It is day again."

Another grunt from Arizak. "If this were true," the tyrant decreed, "then each month as the moon grew

full, it would disappear and later, instead of resting, it would sneak into the heavens to swallow the sun.

My own eyes have seen that this is not so. The sun and moon move above us bringing the light of day

and the light of night. The makers of light do not hurl shadows at our eyes, brother. This is nonsense."

Zarzakhan slammed his staff against the stone tiles. The servant started at the noise and nearly lost his

grip on the lantern-hung spear.

"It is Irrunega!" The shaman shouted the name of the one god of the Irrune through the swaying light.

"The vision Irrunega shared with me, to warn me—to warn you, my brother, that twice, soon, the

shadows are coming! Prepare! Mischief hides in the shadows. Sorcerers—wizards, magicians, priests of

lesser gods, and witches. Irrunega has seen them creeping—slouching—toward Sanctuary. Prepare!"

Arizak wasn't comfortable. He writhed on the cushions, turning away from the shaman and spotting

Cauvin, finally.

"Hah! You're here. Have you heard this nonsense?" Arizak beck-oned Cauvin closer and, cautiously, he

entered the lamplight. "My brother says that the next time we have a full moon, it will turn red, then

disappear, and later the sun will do the same." His face tightened into a scowl. "Have you ever heard of

such a thing?"

Cauvin flinched. It wasn't his answer the Irrune wanted, it was the Torch's. He braced himself for the

sensation, a half-breath shy of pain, that came with a dive into a dead man's memories.

"No," he croaked, then, "Yes," as, in his mind's eye, rippling draperies the color of dried blood fell slowly

over a round, silvery moon and—alongside the moon, as it could only be in recollection, never in life—a

black disk sliced into the sun. The Torch's memories held nothing of shadows, but the Rankan priests had

known the eclipses—that was the word Cauvin found with the images—were coming and that they

would be over quickly, without damaging either the sun or the moon.

Cauvin fought his way back to his own mind. From Arizak to the guard holding the spear, everyone in the

audience chamber was staring at him. "It could be," his tongue told the tyrant while his thoughts cursed

the Torch to greater torments. "If—If Irrunega says it could."

"Wise man," Zarzakhan crowed, rushing to Cauvin's side. "Wise man."

Cauvin held his breath, but that trick failed when the shaman clapped him hard between the shoulder

blades. Odor as thick as smoke filled Cauvin's chest and there was nothing he could do to keep himself

from gagging. Zarzakhan clapped Cauvin a second time before retreating a pace. Cauvin couldn't stop

coughing. Arizak couldn't stop laughing. The tyrant shook so much the stool beneath his rotting foot

toppled and his foot dropped to the floor like a stone.

Cauvin froze mid-cough and stayed that way while Tentinok darted to Arizak's aid. The older man

righted the stool and gently— oh-so-froggin'-gently—lifted the tyrant's foot onto it.

"Better," Arizak said through clenched teeth. "Leave us." He dismissed Tentinok with a flick of his hand.

Tentinok dropped to one knee instead. "Sakkim," he pleaded, giving the tyrant his Irrune-language title.

"I ask—I beg—She has done it again—"

"Kadasah?"

Tentinok nodded. "There was much damage. Many complaints. They want money."

Cauvin was too close. He could hear the conversation he was not meant to hear.

Money was a sore subject between the Irrune warriors and the city they ruled. Bluntly, they froggin'

refused to use it, said it broke their honor, and they'd have risen up against Arizak perMizhur if he'd been

fool enough to argue with them. The tyrant was not a fool. He let his warriors keep their honor intact and

quietly paid their bills from the palace. Shite for sure, since he could scarcely leave his cushioned chair,

paying those bills—especially the bills run up by his own sons—was the joy of Arizak's life. Tentinok's

problem was that he didn't have a wild son; he had a wild daughter who drank and fought from one end

of Sanctuary to the other and back again.

Cauvin slid one foot back, prepared to get out of earshot—but retreat would only prove that he'd been

listening, so he stayed put.

"I said, last time was the last time. You said there'd be a marriage."

Tentinok hung his head like a bullied child. "I have tried, Sak-kim."

Cauvin had seen—not met, merely seen across the common room at the Vulgar Unicorn—the lady in

question. She was attractive enough, even had a few dogged admirers—the timid sort of men who

needed a froggm' strong arm to back them in their brawls— none of them Irrune or worth marrying.

Anzak understood. He laid a hand on Tentinok's arm and promised that he'd have his Wngglies—Cauvin

and his neighbors, the native blood of Sanctuary, had been called Wngglies so long that they no longer

considered it an insult and used it among themselves—settle Tentinok's debts… again.

"Now, go," the tyrant concluded and pointed toward the chamber doors.

Tentinok mumbled his appreciation and escaped. Cauvin wished he could have followed, but Anzak had

already caught his eye and motioned him—or, more properly, his froggm' memories—into confidence

range. Like Tentinok, Cauvin dropped to one knee beside the cushioned chair. Raith joined them—he

had the itch for governing a city—and so—the gods all be froggm' damned—did the reeking Zarzakhan.

"It has gone as you predicted," Anzak confided once his circle had drawn close around him.

He fished among the cushions and withdrew a parchment coil with a broken seal that he handed to

Cauvin who unrolled it. Only a few froggm' months earlier and Cauvin wouldn't have known which end of

the scroll was top and which was bottom, much less that it was written in the elegant hand of an Ilsigi

court scribe. Reading—even reading languages he couldn't froggm' speak or understand—was another

of the Torch's froggm' legacies.

But read Cauvin could and read he did, while Anzak explained to his brother and Raith.

"The Ilsigi king hears his rival, the Rankan emperor, has sent a tournament to Sanctuary—to honor our

role in his recent victories. The Ilsigi king suspects his rival has other reasons. He does not say so, of

course, but he has sent us the emissary who brought this, a golden statue of a horse my grandmother

would not stoop to ride, and eight fighters to—what?—'uphold our ancestors' glory'?"

Cauvin nodded: Those were the words and the gist of the letter King Sephens IV had signed and sealed

himself.

"So," Anzak continued, "now we have them both in Sanctuary, suspecting each other while they pry after

our secrets. What are our secrets, my friend?" The tyrant scowled down at Cauvin. "Why are they

here?"

"War," Cauvin replied with his own wits. He'd had enough time with the Torch's memories to learn some

things for himself. "The Nis in the north are finished. Garonne is in revolt and devouring itself. There's

nothing to keep Sepheris and Jamasharem"—the Ran-kan emperor—"from each other's throats."

"Of course, war," Arizak snapped. "They are young and strong and the world is too small. But why here

? Why Sanctuary?"

A twinge of almost-pain squeezed Cauvin's heart. He couldn't speak until it had passed and, by then, it

was all clear in his mind.

"Sorcery—magic, prayer, and witchcraft." He listed all three branches, of which witchcraft was the most

feared, the most reviled. "They know about the eclipses… When the moon is swallowed, everyone from

Ilsig to Ranke will know, but the disappearance of the sun"—Cauvin swallowed hard: The Torch's

memories were no match for his own dread—"that will happen here. And between the two"—he shook

his head, but the images of fire, blood, and things he could not name would not dissolve—"great

sorceries will be possible."

"This tournament is diversion," Arizak mused. He was a wily, farsighted man. "An excuse to flood

Sanctuary with strangers… sorcerous strangers."

"Irrunega!" Zarzakhan shouted and slammed his staff to the floor.

"What manner of sorcery is possible between the eclipses?" Raith asked.

Cauvin got along well with Raith. He would have answered the young man's questions without a goad

from the Torch's memories, but memory was no fair guide to the future. "Powerful sorcery, that's all I

know," he admitted. "The sort of sorcery no one's seen for forty years or more. Worse than ten years

ago, when the Bloody Hand tried to summon Dyareela. Doors could get opened, and left open. We can't

be too careful."

Arizak stroked his chin and nodded. "We need someone in that tournament, someone who'll win—"

"And someone who'll attract trouble," Raith added, and they all turned toward him. "Naimun," he

suggested with a guileful smile. "Who better than my brother?"

"Anyone would be better than Naimun!" Cauvin answered. "He can't be trusted!" Raith's slow-witted but

ambitious elder brother had already been caught treating with the outlawed remnants of the Bloody

Hand, not to mention every foreign schemer who washed ashore.

"We don't need to trust him," Raith snarled coldly. "We need only follow him."

"Raith said that?" the black-clad man asked with the raised eyebrows of surprise and new-found respect.

Cauvin nodded. "Everything went dead quiet—you could hear the froggin' flies buzzing around

Zarzakhan. But that's not the strangest part—"

"I might have guessed."

The two men were alone on a hill outside Sanctuary, their conversation lit by the faint light of a silver

moon.

The black-clad man's name was Soldt and he was a duelist—an assassin—who'd come to the city years

ago to solve a problem called Lord Molin Torchholder. The Torch—no froggin' spring chicken then,

either—had outwitted him and Soldt had wound up staying on as the old pud's eyes, ears, and,

sometimes, his sword. He was another part of Cauvin's legacy.

"While I knelt there," Cauvin went on, "not daring to froggin' breathe, the light began to shimmer—"

"Zarzakhan catching fire?"

"No—not that froggin' strange. The guard—the spear man who'd played the part of the sun? I looked up

and he was shaking all over—laughing. Shite, I'd forgotten he was even there; we all had— and that's

the way he meant it."

Another arch of eyebrows.

"I blinked and the man's eyes were glowing red."

"Ah, Yorl again, Enas Yorl. Spying on everyone. How long do you suppose he's known we were fated

for two eclipses in quick succession?"

"I didn't get a chance to ask. I blinked again, and he was gone."

"And then Zarzakhan caught fire?"

"No, the guard was still there—looking like he'd just awakened from a nightmare; Yorl was gone."

"That's new. He's finding a way to turn that shape-shifting curse to his own advantage. You've got to ask

yourself—who would benefit more from a little sky sorcery? Doesn't want any competition, that's for

sure. Figure he'll show up in the tournament?"

Cauvin cleared his throat. "All the more reason we've got to have someone there… and it can't be one of

the Irrune, even though Raith volunteered, of course, and you know the Young Dragon would eat dirt for

the chance."

Soldt recoiled. He stood up, stomped away, then turned on his heel. "I don't work in Sanctuary, you

know that. It's bad enough, with everything that happened with Lord Torchholder's death, that my name

is known. But a common tournament? I will not."

"Shite! I understand!" Cauvin couldn't meet the other man's eyes. "That's why I'm putting my name in."

"You?! It's a steel tournament, pud. You can't even draw a sword properly. You're—" Soldt stopped,

mid-rant, then finished in a far more thoughtful tone: "You're getting more like him every day."

Home Is Where the Hate Is

Mickey Zucker Reichert

A dense fog blurred the long-ruined temples of the Promise of Heaven and dimmed the early afternoon

sunlight to a dusk-like gray. Light rain stung Dysan's face as he slouched along the Avenue of Temples

that led to the shattered ruin he alone called home. The dampness added volume and curl to raven hair

already too thick to comb. It fell to his shoulders in a chaotic snarl that he clipped only when it

persistently fell into his eyes. Few bothered with this quarter of the city, though Dysan guessed it had

once bustled with priests and their pious. In the ten years since Arizak and his Irrune warriors had

destroyed the Bloody Hand of Dyareela and banished all but their own religion from the inner regions of

Sanctuary, no one had bothered to pick up the desecrated pieces the Dyareelans had left of their former

temples. Instead, the buildings fell prey to ten years of disrepair, beset by Sanctuary's infernal storms and

soggy climate.

At sixteen, Dysan was only just beginning to learn his way around the city that bred, bore, and neglected

to raise him. He recalled only flashes of his first four years, when he, his mother, and his brother,

Kharmael, had lived in a hovel near the Street of Red Lanterns. Only in the last few years had he figured

out what so many must have known all along: Kharmael's father, Ilmaris, the man Dysan had once blindly

believed his own, had died three years before his birth. Their mother had supported them with her body.

Dysan's father might be any man who had lived in or passed through Sanctuary, and his mother, in what

the Rankans had proclaimed was the 86th year of their crumbling empire and the Ilsigis called the

3,553rd year of theirs.

Dysan flicked water from his lashes and wiped his dripping nose with the back of a grimy, tattered

sleeve. He had managed to swipe a handful of bread and some lumps of fish from an unwatched stew

pot, enough to fill his small belly. Tonight, he planned to use his meager store of wood to light a fire in the

Yard—his name for the roofless two-walled main room of his home—beneath an overhang sheltered

from the rain. It was a luxury he did not often allow himself. The flames sometimes managed to chase

away the chill that had haunted his heart for every one of the ten years he had lived without his brother,

but it was a bittersweet trade-off. Even small, controlled fires sometimes stirred flashbacks to the worst

moments of his life.

Tears rose, unbidden, mingling with the rainwater dribbling down Dysan's face. Kharmael and the

Dyareelans had raised him from a toddler to a child in a world of pain and blood that no one should ever

have to endure. Lightning flashed, igniting the sky and a memory of a stranger: skinned and mutilated by

laughing children trained to kill with cruel and guiltless pleasure. Dysan had personally suffered the lash of

the whip only once. Small and frail, half the size of a normal four-year-old, he had passed out at the

agony of the first strike. Only the scars that striped his shoulders and back, and the aches that had

assailed him on awakening, made it clear that his lack of mental presence had not ended the torture. The

Hand had labeled him as weak, a sure sacrifice to their blood-loving, hermaphrodite god/goddess; and

he would have become one in his first few weeks had Kharmael not been there to comfort him, to rally

and bully him, when necessary, into moving when he would rather have surrendered to whatever death

the Hand pronounced.

Kharmael had been the survivor: large, strong, swarthy with health, and handsome with a magnificent

shock of strawberry-blond hair inherited from their father. His father, Dysan reminded himself. Dysan

had shared nothing with his brother but love and a mother, dead from a disease one of her clients had

given her. Later, Dysan discovered, that same illness had afflicted him in the womb, the cause of his poor

growth, his delicate health, and the oddities of his mind. Oddities that had proven both curse and

blessing. Social conventions and small talk baffled him. He could not count his own digits, yet languages

came to him with an eerie golden clarity that the rest of the world lacked. At first, his companions in the

Pits, and the Hand alike, believed him hopelessly simple-minded. At five years old, he barely looked

three; and only Kharmael could wholly understand his speech. It was the orphans who figured out that

Dysan used words from the languages of every man who had come to visit his mother, of every child in

the Pits, interchangeably, switching at random. But once the Hand heard of this ability, Dysan's life had

irrevocably changed.

Dysan turned onto the crude path that led to his home, sinking ankle-deep into mud that sucked the last

shreds of cloth from his reet. He would have to steal a pair of shoes or boots, or the money to buy them,

before colder days set in. Already, the wind turned his damp skin to gooseflesh; his sodden hair and the

wet tatters of his clothing felt like ice when they brushed against him. But the thought of shopping sent a

shiver through Dysan that transcended cold. No matter how hard he tried, counting padpols confounded

him. Most thieves would celebrate the discovery of something large and silver, "Ut he dreaded the day

his thieving netted him a horde of soldats °r shaboozh. He could never figure out how to change it or

spend it, and it would taunt him until some better thief relieved him of the burden.

A gruff voice speaking rapid Wrigglie froze Dysan just at the boundary between the dilapidated skeleton

of some unused Ilsigi temple and the one he called his own.

"Frog your sheep-shite arse, I'm done for the day. My froggin' left hand can't see what my froggin' right

hand is froggin' doing."

An older man snapped back. "Watch your language, boy! There's a lady present."

The aforementioned lady spoke next. Unlike the men, clearly Sanctuary natives, she spoke Ilsigi with a

musical, Imperial accent. "Don't worry about his language, Mason. I don't understand a word that boy

says."

Dysan peeked around the corner. However else being born with the clap had affected him, it had not

damaged his eyesight or his ears, at least not when soggy shadows and darkness covered the city, which

was most of the time. He spotted three figures in his Yard, standing around a fresh stack of stone blocks.

They had worked quickly. He had seen no sign of them when he left the ruins that morning.

Gods-all-be-damned. What in the froggin' hell—? The goosebumps faded as curiosity warmed to

anger. That's my home. MY HOME! Dysan's hands balled to fists, but he remained in place. He had

seen plenty of fights in his lifetime, enough to know he could barely take on the plump, gray-haired

woman, let alone the two strapping men beside her.

The mason translated for his apprentice, eliminating the curses, which did not leave much. "He says it's

quitting time. We'll finish staging the wall tomorrow, then start mortaring." Mopping his brow, he

straightened, then plucked a lantern from the ground.

"Fine. Fine." The woman glanced at the piled stone from every direction, stroking her strong, Rankan

chin as she did so.

The fish churned in Dysan's gut, and he thought he might vomit. He swallowed hard, tasting acid, wishing

he had not fought the lurching in his stomach. The sour taste reminded him too much of the End. This

time, he struggled against the memory, but it surged over him too quickly and with a strength he could

never hope to banish. Once again, he found himself in the Pits, surrounded by dead-eyed orphans lost to

that empty internal world that numbed them to any morality their parents might have managed to drive

into their thick skulls before the Dyareelans snatched them. The Hand molded them like clay puppets to

fit their own image of normalcy: soulless brutality, bitter mistrust, and blood. Dysan knew that place, an

empty hideaway for the mind while the body performed unbearable evil. In time, the orphans either

severed that place or escaped into it. The first left them forever stranded from their consciences, the latter

steeped in madness.

When the Bloody Hand finally fell, an old man they called the Torch had interviewed each of them

separately. Dysan had dodged dark eyes keener than any man that age had a right to and said he wished

to remain in the palace with the Hand forever. At the time, he had meant it. His brother was there, and

Dysan recalled no other family, no other life. He knew the Hand was evil, that they gleefully sated their

goddess with the blood of innocents, that they tore down the orphans with brutal words, torture, and

slave labor. Yet, Dysan had suffered far less than the others. Once the priests gave him the organizational

skills to tame his runaway talent with languages, he became proficient down to the accent in every tongue

they threw at him. He slipped effortlessly from perfect Ilsigi to a melodious and Imperial Rankene to the

rapid, broken Wrigglie that was his birthright. They had taught him others as well, most of which they

never named and none of which posed much difficulty, written or spoken. They had taught him to steal,

to climb, to bend, wrap, and twist his scrawny, underdeveloped body into positions that allowed access

mto the tiniest cracks and rat holes. They had taken him to houses and temples, to gatherings and inns,

where he had only to sip a bowl of goat milk and report the conversations of strangers, who seldom

bothered with discretion in front of a young boy. In short, the Hand rewarded him for next to nothing and

taught him to survive.

Dysan had used those skills to rescue his brother from the solitary confinement into which the Torch had

placed him. Together, they had returned to the Pits to gather their scant belongings, all the while planning

grand futures that six- and nine-year-old brothers could never really hope to attain. There, they found

their companions feasting on a bounty of raw horsemeat. Kharmael joined them. Nursing the end of a

stomach virus and accustomed to richer foods than his companions, who supplemented their meals with

the bony rats they could catch, Dysan refused his share. Worried for his little brother's strength,

Kharmael forced a mouthful on him. Many of the orphans had come to prefer their food raw, the

bloodier the better; but Dysan's never-strong stomach could not handle it. He started vomiting almost

immediately. By midnight, all of the others had joined him. One by one, he watched them fall into what he

thought was peaceful sleep. But, when a jagged agony in his gut awakened him in the night, he found his

brother eerily cold beside him.

Now, with a desperate surge, Dysan managed to throw off the memories that had assailed him. Again.

Slipping into the shadows, he watched the men and woman navigate the mucky pathway to the road,

shaking slime from their boots with every step. The woman's features pinched. "We'll need to cobble

that. Can't have us swimming through a stinking swamp every time it rains."

My mud. My swamp. Dysan remained unmoving, watching the retreating backs and resenting every

word. Though he had long cursed that same quagmire, it was a familiar quagmire. It was his quagmire.

"Always froggin' raining," the apprentice muttered, and the others ignored him. "Shite-for-sure, I can't

wait to get out of this cess of a city."

"Gravel might be better," the mason started. "Dump a few cart-loads of broken…" His voice and the

figures disappeared into the night, the lantern light visible like a distant star long after they had vanished.

Dysan's fists tightened in increments, until his nails bit painful impressions into his palms. Once certain they

were not returning, he glided to the piled stones and examined them. Their position told him everything.

These strangers planned to rebuild the missing walls, which might have pleased Dysan had it not clearly

meant that someone expected to take over his home. More than five froggin' ruins in this froggin'

run-down quarter, and they have to pick mine. There were a lot more than five, but that was the

highest number Dysan could reliably identify.

Seized by sudden rage, Dysan hurled himself against the piled stones. Pain arched through his shoulder,

and his head snapped sideways. He slid to the ground rubbing his bruised, abraded skin, feeling like a

fool. The mason and his foul-mouthed apprentice had not mortared yet, which meant the wall would

come down, even if Dysan had to do it block by heavy block.

Dysan set straight to work. It had not taken the men long, but Dysan harbored no illusions that he could

work as quickly. Strength had never been his asset. The Hand had made him understand that his frailty,

the strange workings and malfunctions of his mind, his notched front teeth and bow-shaped shins were all

a god-inflicted curse visited upon his mother for her sins. If the Hand had intended to drive him toward

worship, their words had had the opposite ef-tect. Dysan would never throw his support to any deity

who punished infants for their parents' wrongdoing. More likely, the priests had intended the insults as a

substitute for the "sheep-shite stupid" label they gave to most of the other orphans. They could hardly call

Dysan brainless and still expect him to learn the language lessons they bombarded him with for much of

the day.

Sometimes, in his dreams, Dysan taunted his teachers, driving them to a raw rage they dared not sate

with coiled fists, whips, and Wades for fear of losing their delicately constitutioned secret weapon. In his

dreams, he could triumph where, in real life, he had miserably failed. Then, Dysan had done whatever

they asked because he had seen the price others paid for disobedience. He had been desperately, utterly

afraid, terrified to the core of his being, dependent on the praise and approval that he received from a

brother who, though only three years older, was the only parent figure Dysan had ever known. Certain

her undersized, sallow baby with his protuberant belly and persistent river of snot would die, his mother

had not even bothered to name him. He had turned two, by the grace of Kharmael, before she dared to

invest any attachment in him. By then, the disease had damaged her physically and mentally, and she

relied nearly as much on her older son as Dysan did.

Dysan examined the stonework from every angle, ideas churning through his mind. Though willing to

spend the night dismantling the structure, he sought an easier and faster way. Well-placed and wedged,

the gray stone seemed to mock him, a solid testament to another stolen love. He had one possession in

this life that he saw as permanent, and no one was going to take it from him without a fight. He examined

the base, knowing that it ultimately supported the entire pile. If he could remove a significant piece from

the bottom, the whole day's labor might collapse. He had only to find one stone, one low-placed weak

point.

Anger receded as Dysan focused on the wall, here studying, there wiggling, until he found an essential

rock that shifted slightly when he pressed against it. Dysan flexed his fingers, planted them firmly against

the rock, and shoved with all his strength. A sheeting sound grated through his hearing, but he felt much

less movement than the noise suggested. Not for the first time, he cursed his lack of size. He had stopped

growing, in any direction, since he had eaten, albeit lightly, of the poisoned feast and had met more than

one seven-year-old who topped him in height and breadth.

Damn it! Dysan pounded a fist against the wall, which only succeeded in slamming pain through the side

of his hand. He had long ago learned that legs were stronger than arms, so he lay on his back and braced

his bare feet against the rock he had selected. Dampness permeated the frayed linen of his shirt, chilling

his back to the spine. Closing his eyes, he attempted to focus his mind in one direction, though the effort

proved taxing. His thoughts preferred to stray, especially when it came to anything involving counting, and

it took a great effort of will to keep his mind engaged on any one task. The Hand had taught him to use

anger as an anchor, and he turned to that technique now. Dysan closed his eyes and directed his

thoughts. They want to take away my home. His muscles coiled. They battered and broke my friends

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Thieves'World:TurningPointsEditedbyLynnAbbeyInmemoryofPoulAndersonMarionZimmerBradleyJohnBrunnerA.E.vanVogtandGordonR.DicksonContentsLYNNABBEY…IntroductionMICKEYZUCKERREICHERT…HomeIsWheretheHateIsANDREWOFFUTT…RoleModelDIANAL.PAXSON…ThePrisonerintheJewelSELINAROSEN…RitualEvolutionDENNISL.MCKIERNAN…Du...

展开>> 收起<<

Lynn Abbey - Thieves World New Series 01 - Turning Points.pdf

共169页,预览34页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lynn Abbey - Thieves World New Series 01 - Turning Points

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: