Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune by Lynn Abbey Read Free Book Online Page A

own volume to match his, and her tone gained a touch of gentle and sympathetic magic, the kind that drew out painful confessions like pus from an opened abscess. “Who’s dead, Dysan?”
    “Them,” he said, with venom, battling innocent rage and deep-seated agony. “The Hand. They were all executed. Every … single … one.” He looked at his oldest mother, feeling as vulnerable as he looked. “Right?”
    It would only take a single syllable to quell Dysan’s fear, but the Raivay SaVell could not voice it. She would not lie to him. Instead, she gathered him into her arms, her words still pitched to soothe. “That’s what they say, sweet darling boy.”
    Dysan was neither sweet nor darling, and he was not a boy any longer. He knew the truth, that nothing so evil ever truly dies. Somewhere in the deepest bowels of Sanctuary, a spare few or, perhaps, massive clots of Dyareelans laid low, awaiting their chance to wreak their malicious and brutal form of worship upon the citizenry again. He had heard the buzz in the Bottomless Well, in the Vulgar Unicorn, in every filthy, sodden alley and every slimy dive throughout the city. He heard everything, whether he wished to or not, and even the complicated and changing verbal codes of those who dwelt in the deepest of Sanctuary’s shadows could not escape a talent that sometimes seemed more like a curse. “Mama, you have to do the translation.”
    The embrace ended in an instant. The Raivay held Dysan at arm’s length, as if to read his intentions from the expression on his face. Not for the first time, her eyes seemed to bore through flesh to his very soul. “What?”
    “You have to do the translation.” This time, Dysan managed to sound self-assured and doggedly certain.
    “Why?”
    She did not immediately deny him, which Dysan took to mean he might still convince her. “Because we have to know what this man plans to do with it. We have to know if the Hand still exists; and, if so, where.”
    SaVell nodded awkwardly. Dysan could not read her mood, he rarely could; but he sensed clear reluctance. “Then, I’ll translate incompletely. Get an ingredient or two deliberately wrong.”
    “No!” The word was startled from him. Sweat trickled suddenly down Dysan’s back, and a flash of heat prickled through him, followed instantly by ice. He forced his eyes wide open, focused wholly on the single shelf fastened to the wall that held the few books not already on the table. To close his eyes or look at SaVell would bring images of his mothers assaulted by hordes of foul-smelling tattooed men, raped on the altars and dismembered in the name of Dyareela, their screams lost amid the savage cheers, their blood staining the altar. “Please. They will know. Do not cross them.” His next words emerged in a pant as he strained against memories he dared not relive one more time. “They … will … come … here …”
    “Sabellia will protect us.”
    Dysan wanted to shake her. He wished he could open up his memories to her of innocent priests and priestesses dragged from their prayers by masses of torture-crazed and vicious children who knew only violence, to watch grotesquely tattooed men and women fornicate and defecate upon their altars in Dyareela’s name. Those holy men and women died in an excruciating, slow agony, their wits and bodies drained at the same time, their begging and crying only spurring the cultists. Instead, Dysan pointed toward the single window. “Don’t you see what remains of the Promise of Heaven? Crumbling, defiled ruins, all of them.” He guarded his tongue. “I love Sabellia for all she has brought me, but her temple was not spared.”
    SaVell sighed deeply. “Dysan, I’ve seen the scars.” He believed she referred to the marks his single beating had stamped permanently upon his back and shoulders. “Gods only know what you went through or why, but surely there are better ways to root out whatever remains of that hideous, disgusting