Tempus felt the god rustling around in him, the deep cavernous sensing in his most private skull that told him the deity was going to speak. Silently! he warned the god. They were uneasy with each other, yet, like two lovers after a trial separation.
We can take her, mildly, and then she will leave. You cannot tolerate her presence. Drive her off. I will help thee, spake Vashanka.
'Must you be so predictable, Pillager?' Tempus mumbled under his breath, so that Abarsis's Tros horse swivelled its ears back to eavesdrop. He slapped its neck, and told it to continue on straight and smartly. They were headed towards Lastel's modest eastside estate.
Constancy is one of My attributes, jibed the god in Tempus's head meaningfully.
'You are not getting her, 0 Ravening One. You who are never satisfied, in this one thing, will not triumph. What would we have between us to keep it clear who is whom? I cannot allow it.'
You will, said Vashanka so loud in his head that he winced in his saddle and the Tros horse broke stride, looking reproachfully about at him to see what that shift of weight could possibly be construed to mean.
Tempus stopped the horse in the middle of the cool shadowed way on that beautiful morning and sat stiffly a long while, conducting an internal battle which had no resolution.
After a time, he swung the horse back in its tracks, kicked it into a lope towards the barracks from which he had just come. Let her stay with One-Thumb, if she would. She had come between him and his god before. He was not ready to give her to the god, and he was not ready to give himself back into the hands of his curse, rip asunder what had been so laboriously patched together and at such great cost. He thought of Abarsis, and Kadakithis, and the refractory upcountry peoples, and he promised Vashanka any other woman the god should care to choose before sundown. Cime would keep, no doubt, right where she was. He would see to it that Lastel saw to her.
Abarsis's Tros horse snorted softly, as if in agreement, single-footing through Sanctuary's better streets towards the barracks. But the Tros horse could not have known that by this simple decision its rider had attained to a greater victory than in all the wars of all the empires he had ever laboured to increase. Now the Tros horse whose belly quivered between Tempus's knees as it issued a blaring trumpet to the dusty air did so not because of its rider's triumph over self and god, but out of pure high spirits, as horses always will praise a fine day dawned.
THINGS THE EDITOR NEVER TOLD ME by Lynn Abbey
I had just administered the coup de gr&ce to my latest Thieves' (Vor/rf offering- my third - when Bob asked if I'd like to have the last word in Shadows of Sanctuary, It was an offer I couldn't refuse, though I'd no idea how I would put into words the experiences of working on all three Thieves' World volumes. After many unsuccessful attempts at getting this essay down on paper, I began to suspect that maybe Bob hadn't known the right words either. He was smiling when he made the offer, and he doesn't usually give up a by-line that easily. Sigh. Another example of Things the Editor Never Told Me.
Actually, a lot of things the editor didn't tell us were things he didn't know himself. We were all nai've about the mechanics of a franchised universe back at Boskone of 1978 when the Thieves' World project was created. It sounded wondrously uncomplicated: we would exchange character sketches and refer to a common street map; Bob would write us a history; Andy Offutt would create our gods. We only had to go to ground and write our 5,000-10,000 words. Fat chance. Unexpected discovery number one: Sanctuary isn't an imaginary anything; it's a state of mind recognized by the American Psychiatric Association.
We thought we'd gone to ground - it turned out that we'd gone overboard. Bob hadn't told us the things we'd really need to know, and none of us wanted to dictate to the guy who'd created this fun-house, so each of us made great use of the little vicissitudes of life that would add 'grit' and 'realism' to our stories. My not-gypsy read not-Tarot cards, dealt with necromancers, stole a corpse and witnessed the usual street violence.
It didn't seem too bad until I found the entire book oozing out of my mailbox and read the volume in its entirety. We had Crom-many drugs, magicians, vices, brothels, dives, haunts, curses and feuds. Sanctuary wasn't a provincial backwater; it wasn't even the Imperial armpit; it was the Black Hole of not Calcutta. Things could only get worse ...
And they did. Bob told us the second volume would be called Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn - the very name incited depravity. And we rose to the occasion or perhaps we fell. I explored the unpleasant pieces of my S'danzo's past. gave her a berserker for a half-brother and created Buboe, the night bartender down at the Vulgar Unicorn. Well, Bob said we were supposed to have a scene down at the ol' V.U. - but One-Thumb was hors de combat in the bowels of Sanctuary and no one knew who was running the joint. (I recall one of my confreres created someone called Two-Thumbs - I think that was from spite.) Buboe - a buboe isn't a person, a buboe is the rather large glandular eruption that accompanies the terminal stages of the Black Plague; opening it ensures death for the opener and the openee.
Tales didn't ooze out of the mailbox; it ate right through the metal. I haven't seen all the stories for volume three yet, but I'm confident the downward spiral has continued. Each set of stories brings new oddments of human behaviour, new quirks of character that the authors wouldn't dare put in a universe for which he or she was solely responsible. In Sanctuary, though, where guilt is shared along with the glory, one volume's innuendo becomes the next volume's complete story.
And frankly, nastiness is interesting. If I tell you that the smell of rotting blood can linger for years you might not notice what I don't tell you. Consider for a moment some of the things none of the authors know for sure: the weather in Sanctuary - daily and seasonal. It must be strange. If the Downwinders are downwind of the town then the prevailing wind is off the land - try convincing any coast-dweller of that.
As far as the city itself is concerned, I've always imagined it as a sort of late medieval town, out-growing its walls. The Maze is built like the Shambles in York, England, where each storey gets built out over the lower one so everybody can drop their slops directly into the street instead of on their neighbour. There are those who seem to think Sanctuary's like Rome. (Nonsense, Ranke is Rome - or is it that Rome is rank?) They imagine that the town has the rudiments of sewer systems, that the villas are attractive, open buildings and that at least some of the streets are paved. There also seems to be a Baghdad by-the-Sea approach, with turban'd tribesmen and silk-clad ladies, as well as a few indications that we might be dealing with a Babylonian building style. Since so many of our stories are set in the dark, I suppose it doesn't matter that we don't really agree on what the city looks like.
Of course, nobody, including the Empire, knows how big Sanctuary really is. Anytime one of us needs a secret meeting place we just create one - Sanctuary is either very large or very cramped. You can live your whole life in the Maze or the Bazaar, and yet it only takes fifteen minutes to walk from one end of town to the other - or does it? I'm not sure.
Take the Bazaar, for example. I've spent a fair amount of time in that bazaar and I don't know exactly how it's put together. Part of it is a farmers' market (though I haven't the faintest idea where the farmers are when they aren't at the Bazaar). Other parts are like the cloth-fairs of medieval France, where merchants sell their wares wholesale. Still other parts resemble the permanent bazaars of the Middle East. Rather than trouble myself with philosophical questions, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, someday I've got to figure out how many S'danzo can live full-time in the Bazaar.