10 – Aftermath by Asprin, Robert

Crit wanted more than anything to find Strat and simply leave, go up to Ranke and plead his case to Theron, get a new commission from the emperor. He was wasted here. Only Tempus knew what he’d done to deserve it.

But here he was, with the rest of the unloved, unvalued, and unwanted -with Strat; with Kama; with Randal, a warrior-mage who was the lesser half of a broken Sacred Band pair; with Gayle, the only 3rd Com- mando Tempus had told to tarry.

And with those they’d hoped to leave behind: Ischade, the vampire; Janni the Stepson’s half-reconstituted ghost; Snapper Jo, the fiend who had tended bar at the Vulgar Unicorn; and, uptown somewhere among the hellish ruins of last winter’s incomprehensible war of magic, whatever was left of Haught, the Nisibisi mageling, and of Roxane, the Nisibisi witch.

Strat had said-the only thing he had said about the matter-that Tempus had flat run out of nerve, turned tail and fled, leaving Crit hold- ing the bag. The very bag that Strat wanted so badly in his grip, Crit had thought but hadn’t said.

Waiting alone, with no backup (because with Strat gone to Ischade there wasn’t a single man he’d trust at his back), down on the slippery dockside hoping his contact would show soon, Crit had had too much time to brood.

He knew it; he knew himself. For the kind of subterranean work he was trained to do, self-knowledge was a prerequisite. If it weren’t, his distress over Strat and the horrid triangle of the two of them and the vampire might well have killed him before this. Might kill him yet, if he became too distracted by it.