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

Gorthis, that he was an honest fence, at least, he gave the fairest rates in Sanctuary. He need
    not suspect that it was Ischade's gold.
    No, Stilcho had said, absolute and angry. No!
    What do you want? she had cried, too loudly, in this damned tenement where every sound found other ears. Us to starve?
    Better that than some things, he had said, his hands hard on her shoulders, his voice the lowest of whispers. Moria, Moria, it's too dangerous, the damned thing's too big! It's too much! Your fence can't afford a
    lump like that, he can't pay you, he'll cheat you or he'll rob you, one or
    the other, damn it all, Moria, you can't take that thing through the streets'
    He was close to panic. His grip hurt her shoulders and the fear in him frightened her, who knew what his panics were like, how bad they were, how unreasoning and how difficult for her to bear, old nightmares, old memories (not so many months ago) of Stilcho's voice shrieking terror through the river house, haunting all their nights. A woman could not take that, in the man she loved. She did not want to remember that. She did not want him to break, who was at once so strong and so fragile. We'll melt it down, he said.
    When? she cried at him, and sucked in her breath and bit her lip. They had been over that territory. It was what he always promised whenever she talked about selling it-It took a fire bigger than they could raise in
    their apartment to melt a lump like that. They could not heat it and hammer it. The walls would carry every sound. The smell would go through the cracks and the gaps. There would be outcries: fire was the eternal terror in the tenements, and neighbors would come hammering

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    on the door demanding answers, threatening them with violence, because they already knew that her man was . . . peculiar, and likely a fugitive mage: that was the whisper about him that she had heard, a dangerous kind of whisper, because mages were trouble, and a block of Sanctuary in ashes had proved it to the town at large.
    And so, so easily in a place like this, a rumor could get started that would damn them both, and have their apartment broken into. Or their throats cut.
    She would go to Gorthis. He would take the tump and set up an account for her, and there would be no money, except what it took to get a better place to live, and then the things they needed, and the lease of a
    shop—a little shop, that was what she wanted with that gold. A livelihood for herself and her man where he could find the quiet he needed to forget, and shutters and a stout door she could bar against the dark, where She walked, and hunted.
    Down the stairs, out onto the streets, a woman with a basket of rags, a woman with a scarf over her head and a heavy shawl and long skirts to disguise her youth and her looks.
    Uptown, like some cleaning woman going to work, for some middlingwell-to-do family not rich enough for servants. She was legion, in the midtown of Sanctuary: cook or maid, respectable enough and not soliciting, and not a mugger in the town would waste time on her, when there was richer prey abroad.
    Straton slid from the saddle and caught himself, hanging from the bay's stirrup-leather, a little short of impaling himself on the iron spikes
    that thrust up through Ischade's hedge. The bay whickered, swung its head around and nosed at him with the roughness a big horse could use
    —warm, warm, not like Crit said, a dead thing, nor hell-spawned. /; loved him. He took it for omen. He clung to that omen, that Ischade who had withdrawn every sign of gentleness toward him, did not take the horse back, but left it with him, left him one gift of hers, at least, which
    had no hidden thom.
    He wept against the bay's neck, standing there in the rain, both of them wet and chilled. He was very drunk. And he knew that he ought to get back on the horse and ride, quicklyBut he did not. He pushed himself away from the warmth of the horse and staggered a step to the