But Mradhon Vis, linked with that, and Sjekso cold dead with no mark on him; and Hanse outright disappeared, hunting Mradhon Vis, as all the Maze surmised ...
Hanse had involved himself in something which was likely to be the death of him, and what concern that was to Cappen Varra was unclear to Cappen himself, only that he had drunk with Hanse of late, with a short and lately successful thief and ruffian who had wanted - almost pathetically - to acquire style, who spent most that came into his hands on the finer things, a cloak -oh gods! that cloak! - Cappen's aristocratic soul shuddered. But of the unassuming ruffians in the lot, of what quality there was to be had in the Maze, in Hanse there existed at least the hankering after something else.
The business had marked Hanse down - and now stopped and stared at himself. It was always safer, he reckoned, to walk at a thing than to have it walking up at his back - later and unforeseen. Cappen opened the door carefully, went out into the backways, his hand on his rapier hilt, recalling that Sjekso had used the same door last night. But there was only the dark outside, amid the litter of old barrels and used bottles. The woman in black had vanished, and Vis with her, vanished, and in what direction Cappen was in no wise certain.
Patience was rewarded. Vis, by the gods, and this Ischade ... in company; and Hanse crouched lower in the shadows of the alley, a chill up his back, his fingers rubbing at the well-polished hilt of his left boot knife. That promised a revenge within his own grasp: so Yorl wanted the woman, and if Yorl settled with her, then Vis went in the same bargain. Hanse evened his breathing, calmed himself with wild hopes, first of getting out of this Yorl business and then of having Yorl to settle Vis - the means by which the street might be safe again for Hanse Shadowspawn. Report, Yorl had said, and by the gods, he was anxious to have it done, if only they went to earth for the night...
They turned, not the way he had anticipated, towards the lodgings he had been watching, but the other way, towards the Serpentine. Hanse swore and slipped out from his concealment, shadowed them most carefully in their course through the debris of the alley and out on to the street. The moon was not yet up; the only light came from the city itself, a vague glimmering on a bank of fog towards the harbour which diffused across the sky and promised one of those nights in which light spread through milky mist, from whatever sources - a thieves' night, and a worse to come.
The pair tended on up the Serpentine, bold as dockside whores ... but odd sights were common enough in the Maze by night, masks, cloaks, bright colours flaunted by night when the kindly dark masked the signs of wear and their threadbare condition. Man and woman, they were only conspicuous by their plainness, the woman shrouded by the robe and hood so that she might be instead some night prowling priest with an unlikely and rough guard.
Hanse followed, in and out among the occasional walkers on the street, a kind of stalking at which he had some skill.
*
... So, well, it answered, at least, what Hanse had been up to, and upset all Cappen Varra's calculations about Hanse as bluster and no threat. Cappen stopped at the corner with the trio in view, glanced over his own shoulder with a touch of mad humour and the desperate thought that the whole was getting to be a procession in the dark streets... the woman and Vis, and Hanse, and now himself but at least there was no fifth person that he could see, following him.
Hanse moved off, slipping casually down the street amid the ordinary traffic with a skill Cappen found amazing ... he had never seen Hanse work, not after this fashion; had never particularly wanted to think at depth on the essence of the smallish thief, that there was in fact something more than the temper and the knives and the vanity which made this man dangerous. Having seen it, he reckoned to himself that the only sensible course for him now was to go back into the Unicorn, work his way into whatever game might start - his current hope of prosperity - and forget Hanse entirely, never minding a moment when Hanse turned up as stiff and cold as Sjekso had, which was assuredly where he was headed at the moment. But perhaps it was the poetry of the matter, the suspicion that there might be something worth the witnessing ... perhaps it was the assurance that Hanse was into far more than he knew, and that somewhere up there, without untidy recourse to the rapier that swung at his side ... he might overtake the revenge-bound lunatic and talk him out of it. Hanse-was the only likely ally in a situation of his own; the woman had looked at him back there, and there was nagging at him an unwelcome vision, Hanse lying at the doorstep in the morning and himself there the day after - macabre fancy it might be, but the wind still blew up his back. There was only the matter of catching Hanse to stop him, and that was like putting one's hands on a shadow. Cappen was not accustomed to feel awkward in his moves, looked down on the louts and ne'er-do wells who walked the Maze; possessed a grace surpassing most - in any situation.
But not in walking the Maze by dark and unseen. Hanse was in his element, and Cappen followed him artlessly, down the length of the Serpentine, and into territory of the city at large - where the law came, and where a wanted thief was less than safe. The houses and shops here were more sturdy, and finally magnificent, and those latter existed behind walls, and most with bars on the windows. Walkers grew scarce for a time, and Cappen hung further back, afraid that he himself might attract the notice of the pair Hanse followed ... which he earnestly did not want.
One street and another, and sometimes a passage through narrower ways where Cappen found Hanse going more carefully, where they four were virtually alone and where a false move could alert the pair ahead. Cappen stayed far back then, and once he thought he had lost them all... but a quick move around a comer put them all in view again. Hanse looked back in that instant, while Cappen tried to stay inconspicuously part of a stack of barrels, recalling Hanse's knives, and the murk of the night. The fog was coming on and the light played tricks; a light mist slicked the stones ... and still the pair kept moving, out of the merchant quarter and into the quarter of the gods, past the square of the Promise of Heaven, where prostitutes, bedraggled in the mist, sat their accustomed benches like rain-soaked birds. - They swung past this place and into the Avenue of Temples itself; and Cappen shrugged his cloak about him with a genuinely wretched chill and marvelled at the trio ahead, who moved, pursued and pursuer, with such a tireless purpose.
And then another alley, a sudden move aside, which almost caught Hanse himself by surprise, near the magnificence of the dome of the temple of Ils and Shipri.
There Hanse tucked himself away into shadow and Cappen quite lost sight of him, among the buttresses and the statuary of the out-thrust wing of the temple ... vanished.
Then the woman in black went out into the street, ascended the plain centre of the steps of Ils and Shipri, towards the temple guards who warded the constantly open doors in these uneasy times ... four men and well armed, setting hands on hilts at once as they were approached. The woman cast back her hood: swords stayed undrawn, hands unmoving, numb as the patrons of the Unicorn.
Then another shadow began to move, from the unwatched side of the steps, a man from out of the shadows, knife in hand, a swift stalking... which afforded Cappen even less of comfort and made him think that a wayward minstrel perhaps should have spent a safer, drier night in the Unicorn.