Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

their own. They were gone. Eichan might have pulled them when their lair became

unsafe.

But Mor-am had been followed on the bridge, and that follower had not led her

back to Mor-am, when she had turned round again after passing him. Panic ran hot

and cold through her veins, and guilt and self-blame and outright terror. She

had become alone, like that, in the space of time it took to walk the bridge and

turn round again; and find that the follower did not lead her to Mor-am, or to

anything; he himself had hesitated this way and that and finally recrossed the

bridge.

Mor-am would be at home, she had thought; and he was not.

She kept walking now, casual in the mutter of thunder, the before-storm

movements of the street people, moving because if something had gone wrong,

nowhere was really safe.

They hunted hawkmasks nowadays; and Eichan had cast them adrift.

There was one last place to go and she went to it, toward Mama Becho’s.

The door still spilled light into the dark, where a few patrons sprawled, drunk

and unheeding of the storm. Moria strode into it in a gust of wind, but the

bodies sprawled inside in sleep were amorphous, heaped, drunken. There was no

sign of Mor-am. A further, darker panic welled up in her, her last hope gone.

He still might be hiding, she tried to tell herself; might have gone to earth

and determined to stay there; or it was bad and he was still running. Or even

sleeping off a drunk.

Or dead. Like the murdered hawkmasks. Like one who had been nailed to a pole by

the bridge.

She turned and strode for the door, almost colliding with the human mountain