Ripping Time by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

Margo sighed. “Thanks. You’ll come see us off?”

He ruffled her hair affectionately. “Just try and keep me away.”

She gave him a swift, rib-cracking hug, having to blink salty water out of her eyes. “Love you, Kit,” she whispered.

Then she fled, hoping he hadn’t noticed the tears.

Time scouting was a tough business.

Just now, Margo didn’t feel quite tough enough.

* * *

The night dripped.

Not honest rain, no; but a poisonous mist of coal smoke and river fog and steam that carried nameless scents in the coalescing yellow droplets. Above a gleam of damp roofing slates, long curls of black, acrid smoke belched from squat chimney pots that huddled down like misshapen gargoyles against an airborne, sulphurous tide. Far above, an almost forgotten moon hung poised above the city, a sickle-shaped crescent, the tautly drawn bow of the Divine Huntress of the Night, pure as unsullied silver above the foul murk, taking silent aim into the heart of a city long accustomed to asphyxiating beneath its own lethal mantle.

Gas jets from scattered street lamps stung the darkness like impotent bees. The fog dispersed their glow into forlorn, hopeless little pustules of light along wet cobblestones and soot-blackened walls of wood and stone and ancient, crumbling brick. Diffuse smells lurked in eddies like old, fading bruises. The scent of harbor water thick with weeds and dead things afloat in the night drifted in from the river. Wet and half-rotted timbers lent a whiff of salt and moldering fungus. Putrefied refuse from the chamber pots and privies of five million people stung the throat and eyes, fighting for ascendency over the sickly stench of dead fish and drowned dogs.