Read Uneasy alliances - Thieves World 11 for Free Online Page A

thief had already known the secret, but
    luckily Shadowspawn was so preoccupied with his knives that he didn't realize how anti-climactic the announcement was.
    "Well, whatever you're thinking will have to wait until after you've seen the Prince," Jubal ordered irritably. "I didn't go to all this trouble to
    lose you in an alley brawl. Remember, for the time being at least, you're
    not your own man-You're mine."
    "Oh, I'll remember. Believe me, I'll remember." Saliman felt a sudden chill as Shadowspawn met the crime lord's look with a gaze that was not at all subservient.

THE BEST OF FRIENDS
    C. J. Cherryh
    Morning on the streets of Sanctuary, a cold, knife's edge wind that rattles at shutters prudently closed in the thief-plagued maze, and drizzle
    comes on that wind, to slick the stones and darken the aged wood and make muck out of the filth that lies in every crack and crevice of the cobbles.
    Citizens stir out, nonetheless. A body has to, who wants to eat. Everyone goes cloaked and muffled, from the beggars in their grime-colored rags, to the well-to-do factor on his way to the wharfside warehouses. Thus Amhan Nas-yeni, an ordinary sort of man, a man with a nobody face and a nobody shock of dark hair beneath the hood, neither tall nor short, stout nor thin. Nas-yeni goes at a moderate pace in these streets,
    cloaked and muffled, and quite unremarkable among the average Ilsigis of better than average means, merchants, shopkeepers, traders and smiths.
    In fact he is a tradesman and still solvent, despite the recent chaos that
    saw blood, not rainwater, running in the gutters of the town—some might say, because of that chaos, which needed supply of weapons and other such illicit things, as well as licit ones, to people who could pay not
    always with coin, but sometimes in protection, sometimes in elimination of threats, sometimes in liberated goods that had the stamp of Rankene military on them, but there was always a market. There was always a market, that was what Nas-yeni would say. He walked a careful line, did Amhan Nas-yeni, and walked it with, in his own estimation, scrupulous integrity: a man of honor. A man of principles.

THE BEST OF FRIENDS 239
    A man who loved his son, and who had warned him; at the same time he understood young idealists, and was proud of him.
    "Be sensible," he had told his son. "Trade is the way to power." And his son Beruth: "Trade! When the Rankene pigs tax us to the bone and confiscate our shipments!"
    "Did I say, compliance?" he had said. "Did I say, stupidity?" Tapping the side of his head. "Brains, young hothead. Trade is an art of the mind.
    Trade is an art of compromise—"
    "Compromise! With Rankan pigs?"
    "—In which you contrive each time to make a profit. In which you use your head, young man."
    "When they use the sword. No, papa. Not when they can just take everything. Not when they don't have to play the game. Not with the sword only in their hands. You fight your way. I'll fight mine-We're both
    right."
    With that light in his eye and that half-smile that haunted a father's sleep. Like the way he had found him two days later, where the Rankans had thrown the body, out on the rubbish heap where birds, in those dark days, gathered in black, carrion-hunting clouds. Beruth had had no eyes, then. And what else they had done to him before the birds got to him . . .
    Nas-yeni had fought his war of trade then. Had stripped himself to the bone, not selling, at the last, but giving away everything that he had to
    the rebels, paying out coin and weapons and supply to hire men who would find Rankans to question, to find out one thing, only one thing: who.
    Who, because the why of it did not matter. He was Ilsigi. He was an honorable man, the way Ilsigis had been, before Ilsigis tried to trade with
    Rankan lords who had a sword, when they did not. He was of a very old family. He remembered, as many Ilsigis no longer did, the entire tale of his ancestors and the worth of them.
    He