Magic in Ithkar Read Online Free PDF Page A

teeth. “Eh, pretty boy? What’s it have? What’s it take today? It gives it to us, eh?”
    He said nothing. They found the stone; he knew they would. He knew they would hit him then, Coss and his little band. Not while Khussan was alive; but the master thief was dead, and the carrion birds moved in. He shut his eyes, squinted one open again.
    “Coss, I got to have a copper—you want me thieve for you, I’m hungry, Coss. Lords, I got to get something—”
    Gone the lordlings lisp; it was dockside cant, Coss’s own. He had strength in him maybe to cock his leg and shove it where it would do Coss least good; but the other two had his arms and Coss would get up again. There was no choice left, no choice in all the world. Coss patted him on the cheek, ever so gently. “Let ’im go, lads, let ’im go—an’ no, lad, ain’t no copper. T’morrow there be a copper. Maybe a twain, if you brings us the likes again. Khussan got hisself hung: we got a guard or two looks the other way. We got this. We names ourself a thief and turns you in; or you thieves for us. It’s us or it’s Luttan; you works the fair, you pays your cut to someone, lad; Khussan you ain’t, is you, now?”
    “No,” he said. And: “Coss, I got to have that copper.”
    They hit him then and kicked him when he fell among the tent-pegs, several times.
    Then one took his hand and put a coin in it. “So’s you knows where it comes from,” Coss said.

    There was that noise which in the night, in the lowest haunts of the fair, always attended private troubles: the laughter, dead a moment, picked up; the prudent went away quickly and by now were gone.
    Sphix moved and closed his fingers on the coin in panic, for there was someone there with him, in the light that slipped through the tents, on the great flats of tent-sides and panels. He knew that he would be robbed again, perhaps of clothes this time; certainly of his coin; foreseeably of his life. But for that life, he could not stir his limbs beyond a feeble twitch, a halfway successful lurch onto his side to protect his vitals from a kick. He was cold, oh, Lords, cold and sick and to lose the copper was only a slower death—
    “Son.” No one had ever called him that. He risked an eye out of the protective squinch. Perhaps in the great justice of the Three Lordly Ones his father had arrived, the great miracle of his life, or he was quite crazed. This man that knelt down by him sounded old. Dim light shone silver off his hair and the brown shoulders of a homely robe. This was not the father he had dreamed of. He drew his hand to his waist, palming the coin to a slit in the belt, all the while the old man laid hands on him and felt his limbs and, Lords, gathered him up, cheek to a rough-spun robe, and held him like a child.
    He had no strength to waste. He rested, figuring to hit when he had to. Be smart, Khussan would say; fight smart; meaning not at all when you can run. “How are the ribs?” the old man asked. “They break any?”
    (Lords, what’s he want?)
    “Can you get up?”
    He tried; the old man helped. It was—Lords, he saw the light glancing off the rough-spun brown—a friar; one of the wandering priests. He was safe, then. His knees nearly left him on the spot; but the old man’s arm was there.
    “Where can I take you?”
    “Nowhere. Nowhere.” Then a thought came muddling through: He thinks I’m quality. Hopes for some lot of alms. “They took all I had. My father—I ran away to the fair— they took all I had.”
    “Brother,” the old man said. “I’m not a priest. Just a lay brother. Come on.”
    “Where?”
    “Out of this place, before something worse happens.”
    “I’m hungry—”
    “Hungry, after that?”
    “I’ve been hungry, Father.” The hope got tears from him—no need to act.
    “We’ll get you fed, then.”
    It was rescue: he limped along among the guys and tent-pegs, leaned on the old man, believing in miracles, that a thief could find an old man