Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

makeshift furniture, itself spread with rags that had layered deep over un

laundered years, the latest thrown to cover holes in the earlier. By day the

light came from the window and the door; by night a solitary lamp provided as

much smoke as light over the indistinct shapes of lounging bodies and

furnishings and refuse. The back room emitted smoke of a different flavor and

added a nose-stinging reek to the miasma of the front room. And that space and

that eventually fatal vice was another of Mama Becho’s businesses.

She moved like a broad old trader through the reefs of couches and drinkers, the

flotsam of debris on the floor. She carried clusters of battered cups of her

infamous brew in stout red fists, a mountainous woman in a tattered smock which

had stopped having any color, with a crazy twist of grizzled hair that escaped

its wooden skewers and flew in wisps and clung to her cheeks in sweaty strings.

Those arms could heave a full ale keg or evict a drunk. That scowl, of deepset

eyes like stones, of jaws clamped tight and mouth lost in jowls, was perpetual

and legendary in the Downwind. Two boys assisted her, shadow-eyed and harried

and the subject of rumors only whispered outside Mama Becho’s. Mama Becho had

always taken in strays, and no few of them were grown, like Tygoth, who might be

her own or one of the foundlings, and lounged now with half-crazed eyes

following the boys. Tygoth was Mama Becho’s size, reputed half her wit, and

loyal as a well-fed hound. There was besides, Haggit, who was one of Mama’s