Robert Asprin - Storm Season

Nor had that enigmatic and ever-scornful immortal said aught concerning Hanse's expenses in freeing him, or his promise to retrieve a certain set of laden moneybags from a certain well up on Ea-a certain place.

Oh, it had cost.

For weeks Hanse had been idle. He did nothing. No; he did do something; he drank. His income stopped. He even sold some of his belongings to buy the unwatered wine he had always avoided.

Even so he did not sell the gift of a dead Stepson; an entirely mortal one. It hung now on the wall of Hanse's lodgings: a fine, fine sword in a silvered sheath. He would not wear it. He would not touch it. Only he was sure that it was not the gift of that dead man but of a god. Tempus's god, Who had spoken to Hanse and rewarded him for his rescue of His servant Tempus-as that god, Vashanka, had promised.[i]

That sword hung, minus its silver sheath, on Hanse's wall. The scabbard trailed down his right leg. It was wrapped all in dull black leather, knotted and pegged and knotted again. Nor was he one with the mercenaries cluttering the city, bullying the city, and he had no wish to be.

Hanse had another need for becoming proficient with arms, and better than proficient. It was Hanse's secret, and it was bigger than Sanctuary itself.

He collected from Tempus, though not in coin. That immortal had offered to make him a bladesman. (As for the horse . . . well, it was something of value and prestige, at least. Horses and Hanse were not friends and he hoped never never to fight from the back of one. But for a horse, he'd be rich!)[ii]

Tempus did not know why Hanse had changed his mind and sent word that he was minded to learn swordsmanship. He was pleased, Hanse was sure of that. Just as he and his ego were sure that he must be the best student Niko had ever had. Already, he was sure, he was incredibly good. Hanse never needed the same instruction twice. He never repeated an error. He was good. Niko said so, and Niko spoke for Tem-pus.

Leaving Niko now, the thief called Shadowspawn wore a tight little smile. It was the pleased smile of one on whom a god has smiled; a pleased but enigmatic smile. He says that I am good.

I hope so, Vashanka's minion, he mused. Oh, I hope so. And I hope Vashanka finds me better than good!

Hanse wended home, compact and lithe and darkly menacing, weighted with blades at leg and hips and arms. There were those who were in the act of departing this place or that but waited within doorways until he had passed; there were those who stepped aside for him though he made no hostile move. They did not like it, or like themselves for doing it, but they would do it again, for this menacing street-tough.

Hanse went home. I'm ready, he thought, and tight-smiled.

After that business with Kurd and with Tempus and the absolute ghastliness of Tempus's mutilations-and the ghastlier reality of his complete recovery even unto regrowing several parts-Hanse had taken to drink.

He was not a drinker. Never had been. That was no deterrent to millions of others and it was not to Shadowspawn. So he drank. He drank to find an alternate state, an alternate reality, and he succeeded admirably in achieving the unad mirable.

The problem was that he did not like that. Getting away from everything was getting away from Hanse, and Hanse was the poor wight he was trying to find.

0 Cudget, if only they had not slain you-you'd have shown me and told me as always, wouldn't you?

(Put another way, he had been shaken badly and dived for solace into a lake of alcohol. He stayed there, and he was drunk quite a lot of the time. He didn't like that either; he didn't even like the taste of the stuff. Most especially he didn't like the way he felt when sleep stopped his body and let it awake with a mouth like vinegar and the desert all at once, a mouth with the feel of a public restroom for horses and a tongue in need of a curry-comb and a stomach he'd willingly have traded for a plate of pigs' trotters and a head he'd have traded for nearly anything at all. Something had come loose in there and was rolling around, and it banged against the inside of his head when he moved it. Alcohol helped. More scales off the snake that had bit him. That merely started the whole process again. Besides, he preferred control, control or some feeling of it. Strong drink washed that away on a river of vomit and sank it with explosive belches and retching.

(He had the need for control, back there in the barely lighted shadows of his mind. All dark, back in there, in the mind of the bastard son from the wrong side of everything. He had never been in control, and so sought it, or its semblance. He had no need for any drug, and now he knew he had no desire for it either. Not to mention head or stomach.

(That was that. Hanse was off the sauce.)

He returned to being what most others were, certainly most who were his age: a creature of his own subconscious, a stranger dwelling within him, and he lived as its captive.

One day someone mentioned his "obvious sense of honor"-and it was obvious-as he put it. Learned, that fellow said, from Hanse's respected mentor Cudget Swearoath, master thief. And Shadowspawn sneered and looked menacing. That the innocent spewer of insults offered to buy him a drink did not advance his cause or Hanse's mental state in the least measure. The poor fellow soon remembered an important appointment elsewhere, well apart from Hanse, and he repaired there at speed. Hanse predictably spent the rest of that day behaving as if he had no notion what honor might be.

And still he sought, and remembered.

"Thou shalt have a sword," that voice had said inside his head, a lion agrowl in the shadowed corridors of his mind, "if thou free'st my valued and loyal ally. Aye, and a fine sheath for it, as well. In silver!"

Hanse knew fear and some anger; he wanted nothing of that incestuous god of Ranke, for it had to be Vashanka whom Tempus served close. No? I serve-I mean... I do not... No? Tempus is my... my... I go to aid a fr-a man who might help me, he tried to tell that god in his mind, for he admitted to no friends and had sworn to Tempus that he had none and wanted none. He who had friends was vulnerable, and Hanse much preferred his image of himself as a separate room, a person apart, an island.

Leave me and go to him, jealous god of Ranke? Leave Sanctuary to my patron Shalpa the Swift, and Our Lord Ils. Ils, 0 Lord of a Thousand Eyes, why is it not You who speaks to me?

Yet a miracle surely transpired that night, and it served to save the life of Hanse and thus of Tempus, whom Hanse freed. Hanse knew no pride in having served and been saved by the god of the Rankan overlords, and he found his lake of alcohol. When he emerged and dried out, he was still troubled.

He was not the first in such straits to have turned god-ward.

Not Vashanaka-ward! On four separate occasions he had visited the sanctuaries of Us and Shipri All-mother, His spouse. Ils, god of the Ilsigi who long ago fled one land and found this one, and founded Sanctuary. (There was no temple to their fourthborn, Shalpa, who shared birthdate with his sister Eshi. Shalpa was He to Whom There is no Temple, and The Shadowed One, in his night-dark cloak. He was Shalpa the Swift, too. Shalpa of the night, and untempled: patron of athletes and of thieves.)

Hanse went avisiting the house of gods, and came the time there he felt his hair quiver and start up while his stomach went chill and as if empty, for he felt sure that one of Them spoke to him. A god, aye.

Us Himself? Shalpa His son? (Considering his recent drinking, Hanse later wondered if it might more likely have been Anen. He was firstborn of Ils and Shipri, and he was patron of bibbers and taverners.)

Whoever it was spoke to him in his head, it was not Vashanka, not there in the house of the gods of Ilsig.