It was a revenge, a none too subtle revenge, but then the wizard who had cursed him had never been much on subtleties, which was why his young wife had had Enas Yorl in her bed in the first place - a younger Enas Yorl in those days, but age meant nothing now. The forms his affliction cast on him might be old or young, male or female, human or - not. And the years frightened him. All the time he had had, to become master of his arts, and his arts had no power to undo another's spell. No one could. And some of his forms, still, were young, which suggested that he did not age, that there was no end to this torment - for ever.
Yet wizards died, lately, in Sanctuary. Tell the thief that was the name of the game, and even threats might not persuade him. But in these deaths, Enas Yorl was desperately, passionately interested. Ischade ... Ischade: the name tasted of vile rumour; a wizardous thief, a preyer upon wizards, a conniver in shadows and dark secrets, this Ischade, with reason to hate the prey she chose.
And all her lovers died, softly, gently for the most part; but Enas Yorl was not particular in that regard.
He paused a moment, hearing the great outer doors boom shut. The thief was on his way, thief to take a thief. And Enas Yorl felt a sudden cold. Wizards died, in Sanctuary, and this possibility fascinated him, taunted him with hope and fear: with fear -because shapes like this he wore turned him coward, reminding him there were pleasures to be had. He feared death at such times ... while the thief he had sent out went to find it for him.
Darous came back, softly stopped on the marble paving. 'Well done,' Enas Yorl said.
'Follow him, master?'
'No,' Enas Yorl said. 'No need. None at all.' He looked distractedly about again, with the queasiness of impending change upon him. He fled suddenly, his steps quicker and quicker on the pavings. Darous could see nothing - Darous sensed, but that was another matter. There was, however, pride.
And within the hour, in a dark recess of the house with the basilisks prowling the halls unchecked, something gibbered within a pile of midnight robes, and with keen sense of beauty imprisoned in that moaning heap, longed towards oblivion.
Darous, who saw nothing, sensed the essence of this change and kept himself to other halls.
The basilisks, whose cold eyes saw very well, writhed scaly-lithe away in haste, outstared and overwhelmed.
5
Not many women came to the Unicorn, not many at least of the elevated sort, and this one took a table to herself and held it. One of the Unicorn's muddled regulars brushed by, and leaned close, and offered to sit down ... but a long hand from beneath those black robes waved an idle and disinterested dismissal. A ring glinted there, a silver serpent, and the bully's bleared eyes stared at that, at immaculate long nails, into dark almond eyes beneath the shadowy hood. And a fog of alcohol seemed to grow thicker then, so that he forgot all the wittiness he had meant to say, forgot for a moment to close his mouth. A second wave of the thin, olive-skinned hand and he forgot everything and stumbled away in confusion.
'Acolyte,' Cappen Varra thought in his own counsel, slouched on a bench in the nook nearest the back door. There was somewhat of chaos in the Unicorn of late, a certain lack of the authority which had held the peace, and that sort moved in, cheap muscle. But the woman - that was something extraordinary, like the Unicorn before; a woman, a stranger in the neighbourhood... He was intrigued by the dark robes and the fineness of them, and his fingers moved restlessly on the moisture-ringed tabletop, thinking of a song, fingering imaginary strings of the harp he had pawned (again) and thinking - oddly - on Hanse Shadowspawn, in another and quite irrelevant train of thought, as Hanse had ridden his mind all day. Sjekso gone, Hanse vanished utterly, and night falling outside ... Hanse was up to no good, it was certain. There had been neither sight nor sound of him all day long and certain whispers passed in the Unicorn, with more and more credibility: of revenge, of Hanse, about the likelihood of survival of one Mradhon Vis - or Hanse, should the two meet. And about a certain blind man who had found his way without aid into the Unicorn and out again, with Hanse in tow... a blind man and no beggar, for all his looks - but a man of darker rumour.
It was curious business, and more than mildly unpleasant. Cappen was not sanguine. Hanse stalking Vis - it was quite unlikely. Hanse was all temper and bluster. If anyone was doing the stalking it was likeliest to be Vis, and Hanse was ill-advised to have prodded that surly-countenanced bastard ... far more trouble than Hanse really wanted, that was sure. Likely it was Hanse in hiding, if Vis had not yet got him. Cappen picked up his cup again, and of a sudden his eyes hooded and while his hand carrying his cup to his lips never faltered, the sip he took was slow and studied: he watched a second man make attempt on the lady's table.
And that was Mradhon Vis himself... who went up quietly, and met no rebuff at all. The lady lifted her face and her eyes to him - a face certainly worth a song, although a dark and sombre one. And when her eyes lit on Mradhon Vis, very quietly the lady got to her feet and in Vis's still silent company... walked towards the back door of the tavern. Only a few heads turned, of those at the other tables, and those only casually. There was at the same time the faintest ofpricklings at Cappen's nape, a feeling he knew: he touched the amulet at his throat, a silver coiled serpent... a gift, a protection against spells, more efficacious than most priest-blessed gimcrack tokens .... under its own terms. He saw, with a touch of unease the greater because no one else in the room seemed to see ... how Mradhon Vis and his dark companion moved, with common purpose and peculiar menace.
Strangeness enough progressed in Sanctuary ... deaths which made a man naturally think on protections of the sorcerous kind, and to be glad of them if he had them, because where the powerful died, wizardry was about, selective of its victims thus far, but not - perhaps - exclusive of them. There was Sjekso Kinzan, who had been no one. Cappen wondered did such protection as he possessed ... protect or mark him; and as the lady and Mradhon Vis came past his table by the door -
A moment Cappen was looking up and the lady looked down at him, more familiar in that stare than he would have liked. The prickling about the amulet became strong indeed while he stared, lost in those dark eyes with a sense of deadly peril, of his whole life resting loose and endangered, as if some small nudge on anyone's pan might tumble it. 'You're beautiful,' he murmured, because three truths was the rule of the amulet if it was to work at all - 'You're dangerous and foreign here.'
She lingered, and reaching down picked up his cup where it sat; lilted it, sipped and set it down again, all with an eerie hint of humour or menace flaunted at him, at him who alone in the room but Mradhon Vis - or was he exempt? - Alone of all the others,
Cappen stared back at her with his mind clear and with knowledge, with something gut-wrenching telling him that everything about this woman was askew.
She smiled at him, a parting of the lips on white teeth, a flash of dark eyes, an impression that she admired what she saw... and all the fineness he kept so studiously, his elegance, different from others about him, his talents, his - if streetwom - finery ... was suddenly perilous to him, marking him out among all the rest. And most of all... she knew he resisted her.
She left then, swept out of the door which Mradhon Vis held open, a gust of wind and a sudden thud of the door closing. Cappen wanted wine... but his hand stopped short of the cup she had just set down again, the metal she had had her lips to and the wine her mouth had tasted. He pushed back from the table and the bench scraped loudly over the noise of the other patrons. He hesitated, looking at the door which led out to the backways, not wanting to go out there, in the gathering dark.