'They couldn't get loose for a roomful of gold, Thales. Now how in the name of every god am I to get you out of here and back to town, friend?'

Tempus required five minutes and more to make himself understood. Don't. Lay me back. I'll heal. The toes first. Tomorrow I'll be able to walk. Wine?

Hanse laid him back. Hanse fetched wine and blankets and some sort of gruelly pudding. Knowing that Tempus hated his helplessness, Hanse fed him, helped him guzzle about a gallon of wine, arranged him, covered him, checked Kurd and his servant, made sure the house was locked, and roamed it.

Surgeon's tools, a bag of coins, and a pile of bedding he piled outside the door to the chamber of scientific experimentation. He would not lie in a monster's bed, or on one of those tables! He slept, at last, on the floor. On bedding from the gardener's chamber, not Kurd's. He wanted nothing of Kurd's.

Valuable knives and the bag of money were different.

He awoke at dawn, looked in on three sleeping men, marvelled, and left that place that was nine times more horrible by day. He found a sausage, considered, and chose flatbread instead. Only the gods and Kurd knew what sort of meat comprised that sausage. In a shed Hanse found a cart and a mule. He had to do some chopping and some seating. At last he got Tempus out of the ruined house and into the cart padded with hay. Hanse covered him amid shudders. Tempus's cuts looked days older, nearly healed.

'Would you like a few fingers or nose or something of Kurd to accompany you out of here, Thales?'

Almost, Tempus frowned. '

'0,' he said, and Hanse knew it was a, no. 'You want to, uh, leave them for ... later?' Tempus's reply was almost a yes, for me.

Hanse got him out of there. He used much of Kurd's money to buy the place and services of a tongueless, nearly blind old woman, along with some soft food, wine, blankets and cloak, and he went away from them with a few coins and hideous memories.

The coins bought him expensive treatment from a leech who dared not chuckle or comment as he cleaned and bandaged a buttock with multiple lacerations, which he said would heal beautifully.

After that Hanse was sick in his room for the better part of a week. The remaining three coins bought him anaesthetic in the form of strong drink.

For another week he feared that he would encounter Tempus on the street or someplace, but he did not. After that, amid rumours of some sort of insurrection somewhere near, he began to fear that he would never see Tempus, and then of course he did see him. Healed and scarless. Hanse went home and threw up.

He traded a few things for more strong drink, and he got drunk and stayed that way for a while. He just didn't feel like stealing, or facing Tempus, or Kadakithis either. He did dream, of two gods and a girl of sixteen or so. Ils and Shalpa and Mignureal. And quicklime.

THE RHINOCEROS AND THE UNICORN by Diana L. Paxson

'So why did you come back?' Gilla's shrill retort interrupted Lalo's 'attempts to explain why he had not been home the night before. 'Has every tavern in Sanctuary shown you the door?' She planted her fists on her spreading hips, the meaty flesh on her upper arms quivering below the short sleeves of her shift, and glared at him.

Lalo stepped backwards, caught his heel on the leg of his easel, and clattered to the floor in a tangle of splintering wood and skinny limbs. The baby began to cry. While Lalo gasped for breath, Gilla took a long stride to the cradle and clutched the child to her breasts, patting him soothingly. Echoes of their older children's quarrels with their playmates drifted from the street below, mingling with the clatter of a cart and the calls of vendors hawking their wares in the Bazaar.

'Now see what you've done!' said Gilla when the baby had quieted. 'Isn't it enough that you bring home no bread? If you can't earn an honest living painting, why don't you turn to thievery like everyone else in this dungheap of a town?' Her face, reddened by anger and the heat of the day, swam above him like a mask of the demon-goddess Dyareela at Festival time.

At least I have that much honour left! Lalo bit back the words, remembering times, when one of his merchant patrons had refused to pay, that the limner had let fall the location of rich pickings while drinking in the Vulgar Unicorn. And if, thereafter, one of his less reputable acquaintances chose to share with him a few anonymous coins, surely honour did not require him to ask whence they came. -

No, it had not been honour that kept him honest, thought Lalo bitterly, but fear of bringing shame to Gilla and the children, and a rapidly deteriorating belief in his own artistic destiny.

He struggled up on one elbow, for the moment too dispirited to stand. Gilla sniffed in exasperation, laid down the child and stalked to the other end of the single room in the tenement which served as kitchen and chamber for the family, and, too rarely, as the painter's studio.

The three-legged stool groaned as Gilla sat down, set a small sack on the table, and began with ostentatious precision to shell peas into a bowl. Late afternoon sunlight shafted through the shutters, lending an illusory splendour to the tarnished brocade against which his models used to pose, and leaving in obscurity the baskets of soiled clothing which the wives of the rich and respectable (terms which were, in Sanctuary, roughly synonymous) had graciously given to Gilla to wash.

Once, Lalo would have rejoiced in the play of light and shadow, or at least reflected ironically on the relationship between illusion and reality. But he was too familiar with the poverty the shadows hid - the sordid truth behind all his fantasies. The only place he now saw visions was at the bottom of a jug of wine.

He got up stiffly, brushing ineffectually at the blue paint smeared across the old stains on his tunic. He knew that he should clean up the pigments spilling across the floor, but why try to save paint when no one wanted his pictures?

By now the regulars would be drifting into the Vulgar Unicom. No one would care about his clothing there.

Gilla looked up as he started towards the door, and the light restored her greying hair to its former gold, but she did not speak. Once, she would have run to kiss her husband good-bye, or railed at him to keep him home. Only, as Lalo stumbled down the stairs, he heard behind him the vicious splatter of peas hitting the cracked glaze of the bowl.

Lalo shook his head and took another sip of wine, carefully, because the tankard was almost empty now. 'She used to be beautiful...' he said sadly. 'Would you believe that she was like Eshi, bringing spring back into the world?' He peered muzzily through the shadows of the Vulgar Unicorn at Cappen Varra, trying to superimpose on the minstrel's saturnine features the dimly remembered image of the golden-haired maiden he had courted almost twenty years ago.

But he could only remember the scorn in Gilla's grey eyes as she had glared down at him that afternoon. She was right. He was despicable - wine had bloated his belly as his ginger hair had thinned, and the promises he had once made her were as empty as his purse.

Cappen Varra tipped back his dark head and laughed. Lalo caught the gleam of his white teeth in the guttering lamplight, a flicker of silver from the amulet at his throat, the elegant shape of his head against the chiaroscuro of the Inn. Dim figures beyond him turned at the sound, then returned to the even murkier business that had brought them there.