Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

“Strat.”

He spun about, a rush of cold fear and then of outrage. “Damn you, what are you doing here?”

His partner Crit just stood there and looked at him a moment. He had left Crit down the block, down by the burned houses.

“How’d I get this close?” Crit asked him. “You don’t know. That’s what I’m doing here.”

“I want to find the bastard that shot me,” he said. “I want to find that out.”

There was a connection. Crit could put most things together. That was what Crit did in the world, add little pieces and make big patterns. Crit had made one that said he was a fool. That was the man Crit saw tonight. He wanted to show

Crit another one. He wanted to show Crit the old Straton back again, and to take care of his business and seal up the pain and not let it interfere with his working any longer.

Take care of his business and finish it so that he could ride out of this murder-damned town when the Stepsons pulled out, and not go with the feeling that he was driven.

Go out of town under Tempus’s order, riding in the same company, with his mouth shut and his business all done. That was all he wanted.

The bay horse nosed him in the ribs, lipped his hand with velvet, insistent in its devotion.

There was no relief, no breath of wind, through the slit of a window, which overlooked nothing but the narrowest of air shafts down to a barren court.

Somewhere a baby cried. A rat squealed in some fatal moment, in the jaws of some other predator of Sanctuary nights. The loft just above rustled with wings, disturbance among the sleeping birds that cooed and bickered and scratched by twilight and now ought to have slept. Of a sudden they started, all at once, a great clap of wings and avian panic; and Stilcho flinched, standing naked at that window in the dark. Wings fluttered, battering at the narrow opening overhead that gave the panicked flock an escape; gray wings took to the night, day birds put to rout by something that hunted above. He shivered, hands clutching the sill; and looked back at the woman who lay sprawled, coverless on the ragged sweat-soaked sheet. A body did not so much sleep in this third floor hellhole as pass out; the air was fetid and stank of human waste and generations of unwashed inhabitants. It was as much resource as they had, he and Moria. He was alive, but barely. Moria had sold everything she had, and plied her old trade, which terrified him; they hanged thieves, even in Sanctuary, and Moria was out of practice. She stirred. “Stilcho,” she murmured. “Stilcho.”