Storm Season

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  Chapter 1

  THERE WAS ENTERPRISE among the sprawl of huts and shanties that was the Downwind of Sanctuary. Occasionally someone even found the means of exacting a livelihood out of the place. The aim of most such was to get out of Downwind as quickly as possible, on the first small hoard of coin, which usually saw the entrepreneurs back again in a fortnight, broke and slinking about the backways, sleeping as the destitute immemorially slept, under rags and scraps and up against the garbage they used for forage (thin pickings in the Downwind) for the warmth of the decaying stuff. So they began again or sank in the lack of further ideas and died that way, stark and stiff in the mud of the alleys of Downwind.

  Mama Becho was one who prospered. There was an air to Mama Becho, but so there was to everyone in Downwind. The stink clung to skin and hair and walls and mud and the inside of the nostrils, and wafted on the winds, from the offal of Sanctuary’s slaughterhouses and tanneries and fullers and (on days of more favorable wind) from the swamp to the south; but on the rare days the wind blew out of the north and came clean, the reek of Downwind itself overcame it so that no one noticed, least of all Mama Becho, who ran the only tavern in the Downwind. What she sold was mostly her own brew, and what went into it (or fell into it) in the backside of her shanty-tavern, not even Downwinders had courage to ask, but paid for it, bartered for it and (sometimes in the dark maze of Downwind streets) knifed for it or died of it. What she sold was oblivion and that was a power in Downwind like the real sorcery that won itself a place and palaces across the river that divided Sanctuary’s purgatory from this neighboring hell.

  So her shanty’s front room and the alley beside was packed with bodies and areek with fumes of brew and the unwashed patrons who sprawled on the remnants of makeshift furniture, itself spread with rags that had layered deep over unlaundered years, the latest thrown to cover holes in the earlier. By day the light came from the window and the door; by night a solitary lamp provided as much smoke as light over the indistinct shapes of lounging bodies and furnishings and refuse. The back room emitted smoke of a different flavor and added a nose-stinging reek to the miasma of the front room. And that space and that eventually fatal vice was another of Mama Becho’s businesses.

  She moved like a broad old trader through the reefs of couches and drinkers, the flotsam of debris on the floor. She carried clusters of battered cups of her infamous brew in stout red fists, a mountainous woman in a tattered smock which had stopped having any color, with a crazy twist of grizzled hair that escaped its wooden skewers and flew in wisps and clung to her cheeks in sweaty strings. Those arms could heave a full ale keg or evict a drunk. That scowl, of deepset eyes like stones, of jaws clamped tight and mouth lost in jowls, was perpetual and legendary in the 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 someones 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 had all the money first and then go on to other things—Mama Becho dealt in souls, both men and women, and she named the services, when the coin was gone. She had him in her eye—a man who could be useful, but having weaknesses—a man who had tastes that cost too much. She scented helplessness, he reckoned; she smelled blood and made sure that he bled all he had—and oh, she would be there when he had run out of money, grinning that snake’s grin at him and offering him his choices, knowing he would die without, because a man like him did die in the Downwind when the money ran out along with any hope of getting more. He would not beg, or sell what sold in the Downwind; he would kill to get out; or kill himself with binges of Downwind brew, and Mama knew what a delicate bird she had in her nets—delicate though he had survived half a dozen battlefields: he could not survive in the Downwind, not as Downwinders did. So it was possession that gleamed in Mama’s deepset eyes, the way she regarded one of her treasured pewter cups or looked at one of her boys, assessing its best use and on whom it was best bestowed.

  She kept a private den backstairs, that rag-piled, perfume-stinking boudoir with the separate back door, out of which her Boys and Girls came and went on her errands, out of which wafted the fumes of wine and expensive krrf—he lived opposite that door like the maw of hell, had been inside once, when he let his room. She had insisted on giving him a cup of wine and taking him to Her Room when explaining the rules and the advantages her Boys’ protection afforded. She had offered him krrf—a small sample, and given him to know what else
she could supply. And that den continued its furtive visitors, and Tygoth to walk his patrol, rapping on the walls with his stick, even in the rain, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap in the night, keeping that alley safe and everything Mama owned in its place.

  “Come backstairs,” Mama would say when the money ran out. “Let’s talk about it.” Grinning all the while.

  He knew the look. Like Elid’s. Like—He drank to take a taste from his mouth, made the drink small, because his life was measured in such sips of his resources. He hated, gods, he hated. Hated women, hated the bloodsucking lot of them, in whose eyes there was darkness that drank and drank forever.

  There had been a woman, his last employer. Her name was Ischade. She had a house on the river. And there was more than that to it. There were dreams. There was that well of dark in every woman’s eyes, and that dark laughter in every woman’s face, so that in any woman’s arms that moment came that turned him cold and useless, that left him with nothing but his hate and the paralysis in which he never yet had killed one—whether because there was a remnant of self will in him or that it was terror of her that kept him from killing. He was never sure. He slept alone now. He stayed to the Downwind, knowing she was fastidious, and hoping she was too fastidious to come here; but he had seen her first walking the alleys of the Maze, a bit of night in black robes, a bit of darkness no moon could cure, a dusky face within black hair, and eyes no sane man should ever see. She hunted the alleys of Sanctuary. She still was there … or on the river, or closer still. She took her lovers of a night, the unmissable, the negligible, and left them cold by dawn.

  She had sent him from her service unscathed—excepting the dreams, and his manhood. She called him in his nightmares, promising him an end—as he had seen her whisper to her victims and hold them with her eyes. And at times he wanted that end. That was what frightened him most, that the darkness beckoned like the only harbor in the world, for a man without hire and patronage, for a Nisibisi wanted by law at home and stranded on the wrong side of a war.

  He dared not become too drunk. The night Mama Becho ever thought he had all his money on him, which he had—Then they would go for him. Now it was a game. They tested him, learned him and his resources, whether he was a thief or no, what skills he had. So he still baffled them.

  And watched the door. Desperately casual, pretending not to watch.

  All of a sudden his heart lurched an extra beat and began to hammer in his chest, for the man he had been waiting for had just come through the door; and Mradhon Vis sipped his wine and gave the most blunt disinterested stare that he gave to all comers, not letting his eyes linger in the least on this young ruffian, darkhaired, darkskinned, who came here to spend his money. The man came closer, edged past his back, and sat down at the end of the same table, which made staring inconvenient. Mradhon feigned disinterest, finished his wine, got up and walked away through the debris and out the open door, where drinkers and drunks took the fresher air, leaned on walls or sprawled against them or sat on the two benches.

  So Mradhon took his place, his shoulders to the wall in the shadows, and stood and stood until his knees were numb, while the traffic came and went in and out Mama Becho’s door, until soon Tygoth would take up his vigil in the alleyway.

  Then the man came out again, reeling a little in satiation—but not that much, and not lingering among the loiterers by the door.

  Chapter 2

  THE QUARRY PASSED to the right and Mradhon Vis leaned away from his wall, stepped over the sprawled legs of a fellow hanger-on and went after the young man, along the muddy streets and alleyways. The wine had lost its effect on him in his waiting, but he pretended its influence in his step—he had learned such strategems in his residency in the Downwind. He knew the ways thereabouts, every door, every turning that could take a body out of sight in a moment. He had studied them with all the care with which in other days he had studied broader terrain, and now he stalked this shanty maze, knowing just when his step might sound on harder ground, when his quarry, turning a corner, might chance to see him, and where he might safely lag back or take a shorter way. He had not known which way this man might go; but he had him now, and knew every way that he might take, no matter which way he might turn. It had been a long wait already—for this man, this current hope of his, who visited Becho’s with money, who also liked his wine, and bought krrf in the back room.

  He knew this man—who did not know him. Knew him from a place across the river, in the Maze, in a place where he had courted Jubal’s employ, once in better days. And if there was a chance left to him, it was this. He had tracked this man on another night and lost him; but this night he knew the ground, had set the odds in his own favor in this hunt.

  And the man—youth—was at least some part drunk.

  The way crossed the main road, past a worse and worse tangle of hovels, past the flimsy shelters of the hopeless, the old, the desolate, and now and again a doorway where someone had taken shelter against the wind, eyes that saw everything and nothing in the dark, witnesses whose own misery enveloped them and left only apathy behind.

  Down a side track and into an alley this time, and it was a dead end: the quarry entered it and Mradhon knew—knew the door there, as he knew every turn and twist of this street. He thrust himself around the corner, having heard the steps go on.

  “You,” Mradhon said. “Man.”

  The youth whirled, hand to belt, with the quick flash of steel in the blackness.

  “Friend,” Mradhon said. He had his own knife, in case.

  If the young man’s mind had been fumed, it was shocked clear now. He had set himself in a knifeman’s crouch and Mradhon measured it as too far for any simple move.

  “Jubal,” Mradhon said ever so softly. “That name make a difference to you?”

  Still silence.

  “I’ve got business to talk with you,” Mradhon said. “Suppose we do that.”

  “Maybe.” The voice came tightly. The crouch never varied. “Come a little closer.”

  “Why don’t you open that door and let’s talk about it.”

  Another silence.

  “Man, are we going to stand here for the world to watch? I know you, I’m telling you. I’m by myself. The risk is on my side.”

  “You stand there. I’ll open the door. You go in first.”

  “Maybe you’ve got friends in there.”

  “You’re asking the favors, aren’t you? Where did I get you on my heel? Or were you waiting on the street?”

  Mradhon shrugged. “Ask me inside.”

  “Maybe I’ll talk to you.” The voice grew reasoned and calm. “Maybe you just put away that knife and keep your hands where I can see them.” The youth inserted his knife in the seam of the door and flipped up the latch inside, pushed it open. The inside was dark. “Go first, about six steps across the room.”

  “Let’s have a light first, shall we?”

  “Can’t do that, man. No one in there to light it. Just go on.”

  “Sorry. Think I’ll stand here after all. Maybe you’ll change your living after tonight; maybe you’ll slip me after this. So I’ll have my say here—”

  “Have it inside.” A second figure stepped into the alley out of the dark doorway, and the voice was female. “Come on in. But go first.”

  He thought about it. The pair of them stood in front of him. “One of you get a light going in there.”

  The second figure vanished, and in a moment a dim light flared, casting a faint glow on the youth outside. Mradhon calculated his chances, slipped his own knife into its sheath and went, with a prickling sensation at his nape—a short step up to the floor with the man at his back, a flash of the eye about the single room, the tattered faded curtain at the end that could conceal anything; the woman; a single cot this side, clothing hung on pegs, water jugs, pots and pan-nikins set on a misshapen brick firepit at the right on the rim of which the lamp sat. The woman was the finer image of the man, dark hair cropped close as his, like twin
s—brother and sister at least. He turned. The brother shut the door behind him with a push of his foot.

  “Mama Becho’s,” the brother said. “That was where you were.”

  “You’re Jubal’s man,” Mradhon said and ignored the knife to walk over to the wall nearest the clothes, where a halfwall jutted out to shield his back from the curtain. “Still Jubal’s man, I’m guessing, and I’m looking for hire.”

  “You’re crazy. Out. There’s nothing for you here.”

  “Not so easy.” He saw one cloak on the pegs. The man wore one. There was some clothing, not abundant. He fingered the cloak, letting them follow his train of thought, and looked at them again, folded his arms and leaned back against the wall. “So Jubal’s got troubles, and maybe he’s in the market. I work cheap—to start. Room and board. Maybe your man can’t support anything more right now. But times change. And I’m willing to ride through this—difficulty. Better days might come. Mightn’t they? For all of us.”

  The woman made a quiet move that took her to the side. She sat down on the cot, and that put their hands on different levels, at different angles to his vision. He recognized the stalking and the angle the man occupied between him and the door, the curtain at his shoulder, so he moved again a couple of paces along the wall, slipped his hands both into his belt (but the one not far from his knife) and shrugged with a wry twist of his mouth.

  “I tell you I work cheap,” he said, “to start.”

  “There’s no hire,” the man said.

  “Oh, there has to be,” Mradhon said softly, “otherwise you wouldn’t like my leaving here at all, and I’ve walked in here in good faith. It’s your pick, you understand, how it goes from here. An introduction to your man, a little earnest coin—”

  “He’s dead,” the woman said, and shook his faith in his own bluff. “The hawkmasks are all like us—looking for employ.”

  “Then you’ll find it. I’ll throw in with you—partners, you, me, the rest of you.”