"Thieves World v2 4 - 1987 - Shadowspawn - A J Offutt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)
"How can you stand all those clothes?"
Mignureal shrugged, and her color deepened a bit.
They had stopped for the night at a spot of green. A small well, stone-protected and bearing a sign, managed to support a few yards of scrubby grass and two and a half imitation trees. Mignureal read the sign aloud: it advised them not to drop anything into the water but to be sure to leave for others the droppings of their animals, well away from the well.
"Ickh," Mignureal said, making a face. "Whatever for? And why the sign? It isn't as if we'd be taking our horse droppings with us!"
Hanse chuckled. "You've never been poor," he said.
She wheeled on him, showing that unaccountable offense so many people took at any intimation that they lived comfortably.
"You think we were rich? There were nine of us!"
"No, I mean you weren't poor enough. Not really poor, not dirt poor; not goat-chip poor. I learned about that, early enough. Goat turds are best and I hear camel drops are better. But any manure is a good fuel, once it's been allowed to age and dry a bit. It burns, and it burns slowly. Downwind is full of people who can't afford so much as a stick of wood even for their cookstoves, Mignue."
She put her hands together, not quite clapping them. "Oh. I guess you know a lot of things I don't."
"About being poor, yes," he said, moving about the tiny excuse for an oasis, looking for a trove of droppings from previous stoppers here.
"I love you, Hanse," she murmured, and luxuriated in just watching him. Watching him move. It was coming on for night, and night was Hanse's time. He moved best by night.
The streets are my home, he had once told another, wiser woman of some sophistication, who as it turned out was sophisticated enough to be using him. They birthed me and gave me suck. He was less cocky with Mignureal, because he needn't be: he was more comfortable with her, and could almost be himself. That was not easy for Hanse called Shadowspawn, the thief of Sanctuary called Thieves' World.
Very still beside the well, Mignureal watched him walk, watched him move. She had done so, as unobtrusively as possible, for years. She loved watching him move. So wiry
18 Andrew J. Offutt
and lithe, so smooth in the way he seemed just to glide, hardly touching foot to ground.
"Hanse walks like a hungry cat," some said back in Sanctuary, and might even shiver a bit. Actually he didn't; Hanse glided. His buskins' soft soles lifted only a finger's breadth with each step. They came down on the balls of the feet, not the heels. Some made fun of that (though only when Shadowspawn was elsewhere), because it made for a sinuous glide that was strange in appearance. The better-born watched him with an aesthetic fascination-and some horripilation. Among females highborn or otherwise and including Mignu-real, the fascination was often layered with interest, however unwilling. She had never thought or said what others said, predictably: a distasteful, rather sexy animal that Hanse; that Shadowspawn.
Mignureal was watching him now, and so raptly that she jerked when he spoke.
"Hmm. Well, it's this way, m'dear," he said, gliding back her way. "Either someone ignored the sign or others have been here recently and used all the fuel supply. We'll not be having a fire. Better break out the dates and hardcrust and that awful saltwater-dried fish. I'll get some beer off Dumb-ass. Oh wait; let's give him the first drink out of that well, Mignue."
Drawing up a sloshy bucket, wood banded in rope, she looked at him. "Why?"
He paused to meet her gaze. "Just in case. He's the least important of the five of us."
"Oh!" She shivered. She looked into the bucket with new skepticism, then back at Hanse. "But he's carrying all our supplies!"
He nodded. "A lot of which could go on our horses. And I'd hate to have to ride that dumb donkey. Guiding him by his ears, I guess. That leaves you and me." He showed her a sweet look and spread his hands. "But if you drank first and something's wrong with that water, who'd I snuggle up to when it gets chilly?"
"Oh-you!" she said, smiling. And she broke out the copper pan the ass wore. The leathern bag beside it jingled just beautifully. She gave their pack animal his drink. "It's already chilly, by the way. I'll bet Cutie here would be just lovely and warm to snuggle up to, too!"
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She was right. The world had already become positively chilly, and they both knew without being able to understand the phenomenon that soon it would be worse than chilly.
Hanse hadn't yet noticed. First giving the jingly sack a fond pat, he opened the sloshy one to decant some beer. The wet cloth wrapped around the bag had long since dried completely, and its cooling effect had long since left the beer. Hanse didn't mind.
"Ahhhhh."
"How is it, Hanse?"
"Warm."
"Is that good or bad?"
With a little smile at her lack of knowledge due to inexperience, he shrugged and drank again. "Ahhh. It could be less hot. Today I was afraid of using the water just to cool the beer. Tomorrow we'll do that, and remember to re-wet the cloth from time to time. We can use the same cloth to wipe our faces."
"That will be nice, Hanse," she said thoughtfully, "suppose you made sure the sack was tightly stoppered, and we tied it real tight and lowered it into the well. That should bring the temperature down some, shouldn't it?"
Above the beer-sack, Hanse's eyes went large and round. Slowly he lowered the bag, and slowly he turned his head to look, all large-eyed, at Mignureal. "Remind me sometime to tell you why I wouldn't dream of putting any kind of bag down a well."
She looked at him for a moment before her laugh bubbled out.
"Oh! You have, you have!" With a little pouncing movement that swished her skirts, she patted the bag that jingled rather than sloshed. Its leather was seamed with cracks. "How long did you tell me all this silver coin was down that well up at Eaglenest?"
"Years," Hanse sighed, and drank.
"Shadowspawn schemes to steal from the very Prince-Governor," a certain lowlife had some years before told the night proprietor of the Golden Lizard, who had told Gelicia, proprietor of a popular house-not-home in Sanctuary. "And to make a quick large profit in the doing."
Gelicia had transmitted that information to one Cusharlain, who had been conducting a secret investigation of Hanse called Shadowspawn on behalf of a Certain Party High In The Government. (One of the Prince-Governor's concubines, actually, who also happened to be playing around with one of the Prince-Governor's personal bodyguard, the Hell-Hounds, and had schemes of her own.)
Cusharlain had shown his incredulity. "This young gamecock means to try to rob die very palace?"
"Don't scoff, Cusher," Gelicia said, waving a doughy hand well leavened with rings. "If it can be done, Shadowspawn'll do it. Did you hear about the ring he reached from under the pillow of Corlas the camel dealer-while Corlas's head was on it, sleeping? Ever hear tell of how our boy Hanse dumb up and stole the eagle off the roof of Barracks Three for a lark? Had a prodigal offer from some richie up in Twand, he did; and do you know Hanse wouldn't take it? Said he liked having the thing. Pisses on it every morning on rising, he says."
Cusharlain smiled. "And if it can't be done? Reaching the palace, I mean."
"Why then Sanctuary will be minus one more cockroach/ thief, and no one'll miss him." Gelicia's shrug invested her vast bosom with a quake of seismic proportions.
Cusharlain had gone his carefully questioning way, then, and by and by Shadowspawn had indeed broken into the royal palace of Sanctuary, and stolen away die Rankan Empire overlord's Savankh, his very wand of power. For a time he had even become a sort of intim.5 of that same youthful Prince-Governor from Imperial Ranke. Hanse had gone from being a tool of the concubine and her treacherous Hell-Hound to aiding the Prince-Governor in stopping them, their plot, and their lives.
Half die Savankh's ransom, in silver coin, jingled just beautifully in the good-sized saddlebag Hanse removed from a
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grateful Cutie/Dumb-ass. The other half he had left behind in Sanctuary, to aid the rebels against the new overlords. That was the same night he broke into the palace for the third time, and came away again with the wand of power of the new overlord-or overlady, or over-thing; the Beysa. It was also the same evening on which he had wisely deemed it expedient to betake himself from the city of his birth.
With him on a moment's decision had come the bereaved Mignureal: S'danzo, burgeoning Seer, carefully preserved and sheltered virgin recently robbed of her mother, and sometime tool of gods; benign gods.
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