Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

the scarred table with incongruously long curved nails, ridged like horn. “Thank

‘ee,” she said sweetly. Her face in its halo of grizzled hair, its mound of

cheeks-grinned to match the voice, but the eyes in their suety pits were black

and almond and glittered like eyes he had seen the other side of swords-point.

She fed him on the best, gave him sleeping space like a farmwife some fatted

hog; he knew. She would be sure she had all the money first and then go on to

other things- Mama Becho dealt in souls, both men and women, and she named

the services, when the coin was gone. She had him in her eye-a man who could

be useful, but having weaknesses-a man who had tastes that cost too much.

She scented helplessness, he reckoned; she smelled blood and made sure that he

bled all he had- and oh, she would be there when he had run out of money,

grinning that snake’s grin at him and offering him his choices, knowing he

would die without, because a man like him did die in the Downwind when the

money ran out along with any hope of getting more. He would not beg, or sell

what sold in the Downwind; he would kill to get out; or kill himself with

binges of Downwind brew, and Mama knew what a delicate bird she had in her nets

-delicate though he had survived half a dozen battlefields: he could not

survive in the Downwind, not as Downwinders did. So it was possession that

gleamed in Mama’s deepset eyes, the way she regarded one of her treasured

pewter cups or looked at one of her boys, assessing its best use and on whom it