Read Storm Season- - Thieves World 04 for Free Online Page A

Downwind. Two boys assisted her, shadow-eyed and harried and the subject of rumors only whispered outside Mama Becho's. Mama Becho had always taken in strays, and no few of them were grown, like Tygoth, who might be her own or one of the foundlings, and lounged now with half-crazed eyes following the boys. Tygoth was Mama Becho's size, reputed half her wit, and loyal as a well-fed hound. There was besides, Haggit, who was one of Mama's eldest, a lean and twisted man with lank greasy hair, a beggar, generally: but some mornings he came home, limping not so badly as he did in Sanctuary's streets, to spend his take at Mama Becho's.
    So enterprise brought some coin to the Downwind in these days of unrest, with Jubal fallen and the Stepsons riding in pairs down the street, striking terror where they could; and coin inevitably brought the bearer to Mama Becho's, and bought a corner of a board that served as a bench, or a pile of rags to sit on, or for the fastidious, the table, the sole real table with benches, and a draft of one of Mama Becho's special kegs or even (ceremoniously wiped with a grimy rag) a cup and a flask of wine.
    Mradhon Vis occupied the table this night as he had many nights, alone. Mad Elid had tried him again with her best simper and he had scowled her off, so she had slunk out the door to try her luck and her thieving fingers on some drunker prey. Thoughts seethed in him tonight that would have chilled Elid's blood, vague and half-formed needs. He wanted a woman, but not Elid. He wanted to kill, someone, several some-ones in particular, and he was no small part drunk, imagining Elid's screams-even Elid might scream, which he would like to hear, which might ease his rage at least so long as he was mildly drunk and seething. He had no real grudge against Elid but her persistence and her smell, which was nothing which deserved such hate. It was perhaps because, looking at her, with her foolish grin that tried to seduce and disgusted him instead, he saw 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 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