Tales from the vulgar unicorn- Thieves World 02 Read Free

upon him.
    'It's all right!' she said softly. 'Listen! Can you get up if I help you? I'll get you away!'
    Sweat poured into her eyes as she looked towards the far comer. She could see nothing, but if the hunters wore black, they wouldn't be visible at this distance.
    Benna moaned and then said, 'I'm dying, Masha.'
    Masha gritted her teeth. She had hoped that he'd not recognize her voice, not at least until she'd got him to safety. Now, if the hunters found him alive and got her name from him, they'd come after her. They'd think she had the jewel or whatever it was they wanted.
    'Here. Get up,' she said, and struggled to help him. She was small, about five feet tall and weighing eighty-two pounds. But she had the muscles of a cat, and fear was pumping strength into her. She managed to get Benna to his feet. Staggering under his weight, she supported him towards the open doorway of the building on the corner.
    Benna reeked of something strange, an odour of rotting meat but unlike any she'd ever smelled. It rode over the stale sweat and urine of his body and clothes.
    'No use,' Benna mumbled through greatly swollen lips. 'I'm dying. The pain is terrible, Masha.'
    'Keep going!' she said fiercely. 'We're almost there!'
    Benna raised his head. His eyes were surrounded with puffed-out flesh. Masha had never seen such oedema; the blackness and the swelling looked like those of a corpse five days dead in the heat of summer.
    'No!' he mumbled. 'Not old Lahboo's building!'
    3
    Under other circumstances, Masha would have laughed. Here was a dying man or a man who thought he was dying. And he'd be dead soon if his pursuers caught up with him. (Me, too, she thought.) Yet he was afraid to take the only refuge available because of a ghost.
    'You look bad enough to. scare even the Tight-Fisted One,' she said. 'Keep going or I'll drop you right now!'
    She got him inside the doorway, though it wasn't easy what with the boards still attached to the lower half of the entrance. The top planks had fallen inside. It was a tribute to the fear people felt for this place that no one had stolen the wood, an expensive item in the desert town.
    Just after they'd climbed over, Benna almost falling, she heard a man utter something in the raspy tearing language. He was near by, but he must have just arrived. Otherwise, he would have heard the two. Masha had thought she'd reached the limits of terror, but she found that she hadn't. The speaker was a Raggah!
    Though she couldn't understand the speech - no one in Sanctuary could - she'd heard Raggah a number of times. Every thirty days or so five or six of the cloaked, robed, hooded, and veiled desert men came to the bazaar and the farmers' market. They could speak only their own language, but they used signs and a plentitude of coins to obtain what they wanted. Then they departed on their horses, their mules loaded down with food, wine, vuksibah (the very expensive malt whisky imported from a far north land), goods of various kinds: clothing, bowls, braziers, ropes, camel and horse hides. Their camels bore huge panniers full of feed for chickens, ducks, camels, horses, and hogs. They also purchased steel tools: shovels, picks, drills, hammers, wedges. They were tall, and though they were very dark, most had blue or green eyes. These looked cold and hard and piercing, and few looked directly into them. It was said that they had the gift, or the curse, of the evil eye. They were enough, in this dark night, to have made Masha marble with terror. But what was worse, and this galvanized the marble, they were the servants of the purple mage! Masha guessed at once what had happened. Benna had had the guts and the complete stupidity - to sneak into the underground maze of the mage on the river isle of Shugthee and to steal a jewel. It was amazing that he'd had the courage, astounding that he could get undetected into the caves, an absolute wonder that he'd penetrated the treasurehold, and fantastic that he'd managed to