Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

pole near the bridge; but they had not yet hurt him, not really, and he was

paralysed with hope, that this was all some irritation of the men he worked for;

or fear, that they were his own brothers and sisters, who had found out about

his treason; or, or, or-His mind was in tatters. They were near the bridge now.

He heard the moving of the water far away at his left, heard the mutter of

thunder, that confounded itself with the sounds about him. The image flashed to

him of a sodden body crucified against a pole, in the early morning rain.

* * *

“Just put more men on it,” the Stepson said, never stirring from where he sat,

in the too great warmth of the room. The naivete of the operation appalled him.

But there were necessities and places too little apt for his kind. “If you can

do it without sounding the alarm through every alley in the Downwind.” Something

had gone wrong. The abruptness of the vanishing, uncharacteristic of the

informer, smelted of interventions. “This had better not go amiss,” his

companion said meaningfully to the man who sat and sweated across the table. “It

was far too productive. And you’ve botched the other avenue tonight, haven’t

you? That contact more than failed. It went totally sour. We don’t like

incompetence.”

* * *

“I haven’t seen him,” Mradhon Vis said, in the dark, in the narrow room. The

woman- Moria-had a knife; he was sure of that, sure where she was too, by her

breathing. He kept where he was, having all the territory measured, thinking, in

one discrete side of his mind, that he dealt with a fool or they thought he was