Robert Asprin: Storm Season

"Here's the finale for your tale, Hakiem," he said. "Jubal will be leaving these parts now. Where so many others have failed, I myself have succeeded in out witting Jubal."

"What happened?" Saliman stammered.

"What the Lizerene said would happen-if we'd had the wit to listen to him closely. He healed my legs by speeding my body's processes. Unfortunately he had to speed them all-not just those in my legs."

Jubal was old. His hair was white and his skin had the brittle, fragile texture of parchment once wet then left to dry in the sun. Though his muscle tone was good there was none of a young man's confidence in his stride or stance-only the careful, studied movements of one who knows his natural days are nearing an end.

"It's as much my fault as his," the ex-gladiator admitted. "I was sneaking extra doses of his potion, thinking it would speed the healing. By the time he realized what was happening the damage had been done. Besides, he filled his part of the bargain. I can walk, even run-just as he claimed. But as a leader of men, I'm finished. A common merchant with a cane could beat me in a fight-much less the swordsmen we had planned to challenge." A silence fell over the group, one which Jubal felt with ever-increasing discomfort. "Well, Hakiem," he said with forced cheerfulness, "you have your story. Tell it well and you'll have wine money for a year."

The old talespinner sank slowly into his favored squat and scratched absently. "Forgive me-I had been expecting a better ending."

"So had I," Jubal snarled, his carefully rehearsed poise slipping before Hakiem's insolence. "But I was given little choice in the final outcome. Am I not right, Saliman? Look me in the eye and tell me that at this moment you are not pondering where you may go now in search of someone who can give you your revenge? Or are you going to lie and say you think I still have a fighting chance against Tempus?"

"Actually, that was one of the things I meant to speak to you about," Saliman admitted, looking away. "I've done much thinking in the time since we parted and my current feeling is that under no circumstances should we pursue Tempus at all."

"What-but he..."

"He did nothing anyone else wouldn't have done had he the strength," Saliman said over Jubal's objections. "The fault was ours. We were far too open at the end, flaunting our wealth and power, strutting through the streets in our hawkmasks-an easy target for anyone with the courage and skill to oppose us. Well, someone did. If you issue enough challenges someone, sooner or later, is going to call you. Gladiators know the penalty of pride-of displaying strength when it isn't necessary. A wise opponent will listen quietly and use knowledge against his enemy. Tempus has done what we should have done."

Jubal listened with growing astonishment. "Then you're saying we just let him go unmolested?"

"Our goal has always been power, not vengeance," Saliman insisted. "If we could ever seize power without confrontation, that's the route we'd take. Is confronting Tempus the only way to regain control over Sanctuary? If not- then we should avoid it."

"You keep saying 'we.' Look at me. What good is a leader who can't fight his own battles?"

"Like Prince Kitty-cat? Like Molin Torch-holder?" Saliman asked with a dry chuckle. "Or the Emperor himself?"

"How often have you used your sword in the last two years?" Hakiem interrupted. "I may have missed some accounts, but as near as I can figure it's only once-and you could have avoided that fight."

"I used it the day of the raid-" Jubal replied, unimpressed.

"-And it didn't help you then-when you were at the peak of health and skill," his aide picked up the thread of the argument. "There're ways to fight other than with a sword. You've been doing it for years but your gladiator's brain won't let you admit it."

"But I can't fight alone," the slave insisted, his greatest fear finding voice at last. "Who would join with an old man?"

"I would," Saliman assured him, "if that old man were you. You have your wealth, you know the town and you have a mind that can use power like your hands used a sword. You could run the town. I'm sure enough of it to stake my future on it."

Jubal pondered a moment. Perhaps he was being hasty. Perhaps there were others like Saliman. "Exactly how would we build a secret organization? How could we be unseen, unknown and still be effective?" he asked carefully.

"In many ways it would be easier than working openly as we have in the past," Saliman laughed. "As I see it-"

"Excuse me," Hakiem got to his feet, "but I fear you are getting into matter not safe for a tale-spinner to hear. Some other time I will listen to your story-if you're willing to tell it to me, still."

Jubal waved farewell to the storyteller, but his mind was already elsewhere carefully weighing and analyzing the possibilities Saliman had set forth. He just might be able to do it. Sanctuary was a town that thrived on greed and fear, and he was well-versed in the usage of both.

Yes. Barring any major changes in the town, he could do it. Pacing thoughtfully, he called for Saliman to brief him on everything that had happened in Sanctuary since the raid.

i

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 un laundered 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.