10 – Aftermath by Asprin, Robert

From this angle, away from the sun, he was easier to see but no more recognizable. Not that there weren’t a dozen incomprehensible languages spoken these days along the walls-but this one wasn’t a stoneworker. Even Tempus, silhouetted by a bloody setting sun, was not so timeless and out of place as this man seemed to be. Moreover, she could not See him or his shadow which boded ill when Sanctuary itself was remarkably free of magic.

“I’m a free woman,” she said petulantly, climbing onto a different stone where the light was better and she could look straight into his eyes.

“Not here you’re not.”

He was calm, not threatening; speaking simple facts as if there were something obvious she had overlooked. But what could be overlooked sitting on forgotten rubble with her back to the main path?

“Look down,” he suggested in a bemused and paternal manner.

Down. The dirt was red where years of storms had had their way with the sandstone. Nothing grew there. Nothing was buried there. She couldn’t See anything.

“Where you’re sitting. Where you’ve been sitting this past hour.”

Well, that. It was rubble, after all. These stones had been dressed and shaped into a building once, a long time ago. Not as if these were the only rocks around with little chips and bumps of some forgotten language on their sides. Lords and frogs, it could be Rankene for all she would know, wind-blasted as it was and illiterate as she was.

She took a mean-tempered bite out of her fruit and jawed it pointedly. “So?”

“Are you blind, child?”