Free Book 5 - With Mercy Toward None by Glen Cook Page A

By night? In town thick with rogues and thieves?" His heart hammered. He could not picture himself lasting five minutes with a fortune like that on him.
    His world-view crippled him. He saw in everyone the thief he was himself.
    "You can handle yourself, darling. I've seen you. Besides, who would know that you're carrying them?"
    "Everybodys. Self, being nervous, would worry out loud... "
    "Don't be silly." She shoved the leather bag into his pudgy hands. "Go on. Or we won't have anything to eat tomorrow."
    He went. His intentions were honorable. Kirsten was his first love. Temptation did not bite him till he entered the High Street itself.
    He froze.
    He thought about everything jewels could buy. About Kirsten and an imminent visit to a priest. About opportunities in games of chance opened by unlimited betting funds. About that damned priest...
    He panicked. This time he did run.
    He did not realize that he had left his donkey and props till he was over the border into the kingdom of Altea.
    By then it was too late. He could not go back. He had damned himself with Kirsten forever.
    It hurt. A lot. For weeks the pain kept him contained within himself, and out of trouble.
    But the ache just would not go away. He began drinking to deaden it. And in Alperin, a small town in southern Altea, while drunk, he wandered into a dice game.
    His luck was terrible. His mental state contributed nothing to intelligent betting. Before they let him go he was broke again, having retained just enough common sense to have earlier re-equipped himself with the tools of his dubious trade.
    The exigencies of surviving an Altean winter banished Kirsten from his thoughts. He had no time for her. She fled him forever.
    With her went his proud resolutions about gambling and thieving.
    He ceased giving a damn about tomorrow. His future looked too bleak. He could no longer scrutinize it. And the less he cared, the bleaker it became.
    He had fallen into a paradoxical trap. Though filled with a lust for life and learning, he was systematically eradicating tomorrows with wine and stupid crimes.
    Tamerice lay south of Altea, a long snake of a kingdom squished between the Kapenrung Mountains and the Altean frontier. Mocker drifted into Tamerice with spring. His successes had been just frequent enough to keep body and soul together. His weight had declined. He had developed a shakiness which occasionally betrayed him when he tried one of his more complicated tricks.
    He drew his best response when he stooped to entertaining. Tamericians enjoyed the Tubal and Polo plays. But a false pride or unconscious death wish drove him. He performed only when gnawing hunger compelled it.
    He reached the town of Raemdouck the day after a carnival had arrived, and spread his mat beside the road the Raemdouckers followed to the field where the carnival had raised its tents. A pre-selected traffic helped him marginally.
    His third morning there, before traffic picked up, he had a visitor. The man was tall, lean, and had tight, dark eyes in a hard face. Policeman? Bandit? Mocker wondered nervously.
    The man sat down facing him, stared for more than a minute.
    Mocker wriggled. A demon ground coarse salt into his nerve endings.
    "I'm Damo Sparen," his visitor finally announced. His voice was as cold and hard as his appearance. "I own the carnival. I've been watching you."
    Mocker shrugged. Was he supposed to beg forgiveness for bleeding off a miniscule portion of the man's revenues?
    "You're interesting. One of the nastier cases of self-abuse I've seen. Talent bleeds out of you, and you waste it to the last ounce. Do you
want
to die young?"
    Mocker gulped. "Maybeso. In thousand years, or two." He grinned weakly. He was scared. "What is going on here?"
    "I wanted to tell you something. I'm no diviner, but this prediction doesn't require the skills of a necromancer. You will die. Soon. Unless you mend your ways."
    Mocker's fear tightened its noose.
    "You keep cutting purses,