Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

But the irony of it palled and the bitterness stayed. Perhaps the Vashanka

lovers suspected what they did. Perhaps they had some inkling of her motives or

the need-and so they sent the likes of Haught, a messenger they expected to have

had thus silenced on the first visit, then to supply her with more and more; or

a lure they dragged past her with cynical cruelty, to ascertain how much they

believed was truth-what she was, and how long her restraint might go on.

She thought on Haught and thought, as she had each time he came to her; and that

too they had surely intended. The hunger grew. Soon it would be too strong.

“Vis,” she said aloud. The images merged in her mind, Vis and Haught, two dark

foreigners, both of whom she had let go-because she was not pitiless. There was

hell in the slave’s eyes, like hers. Time after time he had passed that door in

either direction, and the hell grew, and the terror that was itself a lure-one

could develop such a taste, for the beauty and the fear, for gentility. Like a

drug. She had more pride.

She had had no intention of going out at all tonight. But the restlessness grew,

and she hated them for that, for what they had done, that now she would kill,

the way she always killed-but not in the way they thought. It was the luck that

followed her, the curse an enemy had laid on her.

She slung on her black cloak and pulled up the hood as she went out by that back

way as well, through the small vine-tangled garden and past the gate to the

river walk, pace, pace, pace along the unpaved way.