menacing street-tough.
Hanse went home. I’m ready, he thought, and tight-smiled.
After that business with Kurd and with Tempus and the absolute ghastliness of
Tempus’s mutilations-and the ghastlier reality of his complete recovery even
unto regrowing several parts-Hanse had taken to drink.
He was not a drinker. Never had been. That was no deterrent to millions of
others and it was not to Shadowspawn. So he drank. He drank to find an alternate
state, an alternate reality, and he succeeded admirably in achieving the unad
mirable.
The problem was that he did not like that. Getting away from everything was
getting away from Hanse, and Hanse was the poor wight he was trying to find.
0 Cudget, if only they had not slain you-you’d have shown me and told me as
always, wouldn’t you?
(Put another way, he had been shaken badly and dived for solace into a lake of
alcohol. He stayed there, and he was drunk quite a lot of the time. He didn’t
like that either; he didn’t even like the taste of the stuff. Most especially he
didn’t like the way he felt when sleep stopped his body and let it awake with a
mouth like vinegar and the desert all at once, a mouth with the feel of a public
restroom for horses and a tongue in need of a curry-comb and a stomach he’d
willingly have traded for a plate of pigs’ trotters and a head he’d have traded
for nearly anything at all. Something had come loose in there and was rolling
around, and it banged against the inside of his head when he moved it. Alcohol
helped. More scales off the snake that had bit him. That merely started the