something else, and darker, and more terrible; and smelled behind her reek a
delicate musk, and saw hell behind her eyes.
Or he saw himself, who also had traded too much of himself and sold what he
would have kept if he had had the luxury.
But generally the whores and the bullies let Mradhon Vis alone. That was tribute
of a kind in Mama Becho’s, to an outsider, and not a large man. He was foreign.
It was in his dark face and in his accent. And if he was watched, still no one
had seriously tried him, excepting Elid.
He paid for the special wine. He maintained his solitude through a slice of
gritty stoneground bread and some of Mama Becho’s passable bean soup, and kept
his surreptitious watch over the door.
Night after night he spent here, and many of his days. He lodged across the
alley, in space Mama Becho rented for more than it was worth-excepting her
assurance that it would stay inviolate, that the meager furnishings would always
be there, that there would never be some sly opening of the door when he was out
or while he was asleep. Tygoth made his rounds of Mama’s properties all night
with stick in hand, and if anything was not what it ought to be, then corpses
floated down the White Foal in the morning.
That was good so long as his small hoard of coin lasted, and it was running low.
Then the reckoning came.
The woman-mountain rolled his way and loomed beside him, setting down a second
cup of wine and repossessing the empty. “Fine stuff,” she said, “this.”
He laid down the coin she wanted. Fingers the match of Tygoth’s picked it off