Hero in the Shadows by David Gemmell Page A

carry you toward evil?”
    “Yes,” said Kysumu.
    “Hardly a comforting thought,” said Matze Chai, decidinghe had no wish to elicit further explanation. He disliked excitement of any kind, and this journey had already contained too many incidents. Now it seemed that the mere presence of Kysumu guaranteed further adventure.
    Pushing thoughts of demons and swords from his mind, he closed his eyes, picturing his garden and the scented flowering trees. The image calmed him.
    From outside the palanquin came a raucous noise. The ditchdigger was singing in a loud, horrible, discordant voice. Matze Chai’s eyes snapped open. The song was in a broad northern Chiatze dialect and concerned the physical endowments and unnatural body hair of a young pleasure woman.
    A small pain began behind Matze Chai’s left eye.
    Kysumu rang the bell, and the palanquin came to a smooth halt. The
Rajnee
opened the door and leapt lightly to the ground. The singing stopped.
    Matze Chai heard the loud oaf say: “But the next verse is really funny.”
    Lalitia was a woman not easily surprised. She had learned all there was to know about men by the time she was fourteen, and her capacity for surprise had been exhausted long before that. Orphaned and living on the streets of the capital at the age of eight, she had learned to steal, to beg, to run, and to hide. Sleeping on the sand beneath the wharf timbers, she had sometimes huddled in the dark and watched the cutthroats drag victims to the water’s edge before knifing them viciously and hurling the bodies into the surf. She had listened as the cheap tavern whores plied their trade, rutting with their customers in the moon shadows. On many occasions she was close by when the officers of the watch came around to collect their bribes from the tavern women before taking turns enjoying free sport with them.
    The redheaded child learned swiftly. By the age of twelve she was leading a gang of juvenile cutpurses, operatingthroughout the market squares, paying out a tenth of their earnings to the watch to insure that they were never caught.
    For two years Lalitia—Sly Red as she was known then—hoarded her own takings, hiding the coin where no one would find it. She spent her spare time crouched in alleyways watching the rich enjoying their meals in the finer taverns, noting the way the great ladies moved and spoke, the languid grace they displayed, the faint air of boredom they assumed when in the company of men. Their backs were always straight, their movements slow, smooth, and assured. Their skin was creamy white, untanned—indeed, untouched—by the sun. In summer they wore wide-brimmed hats with gossamer veils. Sly Red watched and absorbed their movements, carefully storing them in the vaults of memory.
    At fourteen her luck had run out. While running from a merchant whose money pouch strings she had neatly sliced, she had slipped on a piece of rotten fruit and fallen heavily to the cobbles. The merchant had held her until the watch soldiers had arrived, and they had dragged her away.
    “Can’t help you this time, Red,” one of them had said. “You just robbed Vanis, and he’s an important man.”
    The magistrate had sentenced her to twelve years. She served three in a rat-infested dungeon before being summoned one day to the office of the jail captain, a young officer named Aric. He was slim and cold-eyed, even handsome in a vaguely dissolute manner.
    “I saw you walking by the far wall this morning,” he told the seventeen-year-old girl. “You do not appear to be a peasant.”
    Sly Red had been using her hour of daylight to practice the movements she had observed among the great ladies of the capital. She said nothing to the captain. “Come closer, let me look at you,” he said. She stepped forward. He moved in, then recoiled. “You have lice,” he said.
    “Aye,” she said huskily, “and fleas. I think the bath in myapartment is out of order. Perhaps you could assign a servant to