Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

tent of pink-and-lemon summer sky returned to illuminate the Mageguild’s fete?

Janni snarled and flushed with rage at the adepts’ dissembling, threatening to

go turn Torchholder (who had preceded them back among the celebrants,

disheveled, loudmouthed, but none the worse for wear) upside down to see if any

truth might fall out, but Niko cautioned him to let fools believe what fools

believe, and to make his farewells brief and polite-whatever they felt about the

mages, they had to live with them.

When at last they rode out of the Street of Arcana toward the Alekeep, to quench

their well-earned thirsts where Niko could check on the faring of a girl who

mattered to him, he was ponying the extra horse he had lent Askelon, since

neither the dream lord nor his companion Jihan had been anywhere to be found

among guests trying grimly to recapture at least a semblance of revelry.

For Niko, the slow ride through mercifully dark streets was a godsend, the deep

midnight sky a mask he desperately needed to keep between him and the world

awhile. In its cover, he could afford to let his composure, slipping away

inexorably of its own weight, fall from him altogether. As it happened, because

of the riderless horse, he was bringing up the rear. That, too, suited him, as

did their tortuous progress through the ways and intersections thronging

intermittently with upper-class (if there was such a distinction to be made

here) Ilsigs ushering in the new year. Personally, he did not like the start of

it: the events of the last twenty-four hours he considered somewhat less than