Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

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