whole process again. Besides, he preferred control, control or some feeling of
it. Strong drink washed that away on a river of vomit and sank it with explosive
belches and retching.
(He had the need for control, back there in the barely lighted shadows of his
mind. All dark, back in there, in the mind of the bastard son from the wrong
side of everything. He had never been in control, and so sought it, or its
semblance. He had no need for any drug, and now he knew he had no desire for it
either. Not to mention head or stomach.
(That was that. Hanse was off the sauce.)
He returned to being what most others were, certainly most who were his age: a
creature of his own subconscious, a stranger dwelling within him, and he lived
as its captive.
One day someone mentioned his “obvious sense of honor”-and it was obvious-as he
put it. Learned, that fellow said, from Hanse’s respected mentor Cudget
Swearoath, master thief. And Shadowspawn sneered and looked menacing. That the
innocent spewer of insults offered to buy him a drink did not advance his cause
or Hanse’s mental state in the least measure. The poor fellow soon remembered an
important appointment elsewhere, well apart from Hanse, and he repaired there at
speed. Hanse predictably spent the rest of that day behaving as if he had no
notion what honor might be.
And still he sought, and remembered.
“Thou shalt have a sword,” that voice had said inside his head, a lion agrowl in
the shadowed corridors of his mind, “if thou free’st my valued and loyal ally.