Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

back alleys there who could turn the ore to finest steel.

“We’ll make it yet,” he said to the darkness, not noticing that Thrusher had

come to sit beside him.

“Make it to where?” the little man asked. “We don’t dare go to the capital now,

do we?”

“We’re headed toward Sanctuary from this moment on.”

Thrusher could scarcely contain his surprise. Walegrin’s intense dislike of the

city of his birth was well-known. Not even his own men had suspected they would

ever return there. “Well, I suppose a man can hide from anything in Sanctuary’s

gutters,” Thrusher temporized.

“Not only hide, but get our steel too. We’ll head south in the morning. Prepare

the men.”

“Across the desert?”

“No-one will be looking for us there.”

His orders given and certain to be obeyed, Walegrin strode into the darkness. He

was used to sleepless nights. Indeed, he almost preferred them to his nightmare

ridden slumber. And now, with thoughts of Sanctuary high in his mind, sleep

would be anything but welcome.

Thrusher was right-a man could hide in Sanctuary. Walegrin’s father had done it,

but hiding hadn’t improved him any. He’d ended his life reviled in a city that

tolerated almost anything, hacked to pieces and cursed by the S’danzo of the

bazaar. It was his father’s death, and the memory of the curse that haunted

Walegrin’s nights.

By rights it wasn’t his curse at all, but his father’s. The old man was never

without a doxy; Rezzel was only the last of a long, anonymous procession of

women through Walegrin’s childhood. She was a S’danzo beauty, wild even