Uneasy alliances - Thieves World 11 by Robert Asprin, Lynn Abbey Read Free Book Online

whispered about only rarely and in the lowest of tones among the few Ilsigis who knew they had a Patron, of sortsIt confused even Nas-yeni.
    But the torment, the absolute hell in Straton's look nowadays—that satisfied him. So did the rumors of estrangement.
    And to help it along, he took to the skills of his youth—set up an archery butt in the warehouse now largely depleted of goods, but enough for a man to live on, who did not plan to live forever. He had been a damned fine shot, in his youth, in the time that he had spent in the city guard. The hand and the eye remembered. Hate might make the one tremble. Grief might blur the eye. But purpose—that was clear and cold. Critias was back. Straton was in ruin already: one of the
    Pair was broken, and too difficult to predict.
    Eliminate him.
    From a rooftop.
    In a way that an assassin could escape, and lay guilt upon the other Partner, and fear on all their company. It was what Beruth would have done, it was his kind of vengeance; it had sharp, keen savor, the drawing
    of that arrow—blue-fletched, Jubal's colors, not because Nas-yeni had any particular grudge against the ex-slaver, but because it might make the maximum of trouble-And the wind being what it was, and Straton's damned horse in the way—
    But it had hit, all the same, and created havoc beyond Nas-yeni's own imagining—delivered Straton wounded, into the hands of enemies who had not handled him gently, by all accounts; and crippled him; while Tempus, displeased with a city block in ruins and with the rise ofwitchly
    influences in his ranks, one supposed, demoted him.
    And departed, leaving, the gods be thanked, Critias in command of a city Straton had lusted after, Straton crippled and drinking himself stu242 UNEASY ALLIANCES
    porous night after night in the Vulgar Unicorn, Straton with so much witch-sign about him that he was notorious, and even footpads refrained from cutting his throat on his drunken wanderings to and from the barracks or the bars. They refrained because the word was out in the underworld of Sanctuary that this man was protected, and that throats would be cut if this man's was.
    Things were altogether as Nas-yeni would have them: one enemy in a living hell, banished even from the witch's bed, living because no one was
    friend enough to kill him; and the other—the other—
    There was no more to be done to Straton.
    There was Critias . . . safe as yet, newly set into an office that Tempus had given him, perhaps with a sense that here was the only place that Straton might stay alive and Critias the only man who might have a chance to heal him: that much understanding Nas-yeni had of his enemies as he had had of his rivals in trade, canny trader that he had been,
    and smuggler, and judge of men. It was a fool who failed to see his enemy
    as man like any man, needing the things a man needed, like companionship, like solace, like—the illusions of these things, where the substance
    failed. By such things a trader lived and prospered; by such things, the likes of Straton and Critias worked on their victims, breaking their confidence as they broke the body.
    By such things a man could unravel another.
    A hunter had to be his own prey. They were locked together in this hunt, which had achieved a certain intimacy. Nas-yeni who had no family, had two men whose every thought he surmised, whose every move he could now predict; they kept him from loneliness, they kept his heart beating and the blood moving in his veins; they gave him something to think about and to look forward to, something which made him very glad his shots had gone amiss.
    First Straton. Now Critias. Critias—who already suffered. He might simply live and watch Critias, watch the slow embitterment of a man left to a town which hated him. But he knew this man like a son. He knew that such embitterment would leach the feeling out of a man like Critias;
    knew that some morning Straton would simply turn up dead of drink or some