10 – Aftermath by Asprin, Robert

Crit squinted into the gloom but the only thing he saw better for his trouble was the rigging of a small fishing boat bobbing behind the stranger, much farther down the quayside than the cloaked man.

Was it a masking spell, or a trick of the light that veiled this face in gloom? The fellow was out of reach, but just barely. And familiar, but so was half of Sanctuary. Someone he’d rousted long ago, Crit’s mind said, and started spinning through the years, seeking to match a face to the voice he recognized.

Crit asked, to hear the voice again, “What do you want, honest work? There isn’t any, not here. Prefer my service to Jubal’s? Is that what you’re getting at?”

“Yours? You’ve got a service, now? That’s how come the black man sent me to help you out?”

The hooded man’s ^’s were sibilantly northern and the tension underly- ing his words was full of satisfaction.

Somebody they’d done something to once, for sure. Somebody the Sacred Band hadn’t treated with softest gloves. Somebody who was en- joying this more than he ought, because he feared Crit and his kind more than he’d admit.

“Got a name, friend?” Crit said easily, shifting enough that he could slide his hand onto his belt and his fingers toward his knife’s hilt without being either too obvious or too surreptitious. It wasn’t a threat so much as a punctuation mark.

The contact saw, and tossed his head. “Vis. Ring a bell. Commander?”

Commander. Crit still couldn’t get used to it, not in Sanctuary, not in this context, not with all its current connotations. Did Tempus still hold Crit’s affair with Kama against him so venomously that he’d sentence him to years of hard labor here with violent death at the end of it?