Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

“Otherwise,” she said to Walegrin, “all this will have been for nothing.”

She left him then, and Leyn, who still had the key, let her out through the Gate of the Gods. When no one could see her, the tears at last spilled down her cheeks, and hating the tears, she began to run. She didn’t know the streets she took, nor did she know the time that passed before her grief and anger subsided.

She wound up on the wharf again where she had been the night before, sitting, dangling her feet over the deep water as Sabellia began her journey through the sky.

She could still feel Zip’s eyes upon her back, watching her as he had last evening.

She shuddered and hugged herself and wished for Reyk to keep her company. But the falcon was in his cage, and she was alone.

Alone.

As alone as Tempus Thales?

IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

C. J. Cherryh

Haught opened the sealed window ever so carefully, in this nightbound room of shrouded furniture, the hulking, concealed chairs and table like so many pale ghosts reverted only then to furniture, pretending in the shadows. He made no sound. He made no trial of the wards which sealed the place, nor even of the vented shutters which closed the outside. But a wind breached those barriers effortlessly. The first breath of outside that had come into the mansion in… very long, stirred the draperies and the sheets and brought a sultry warmth to the dank, sealed staleness in which he had lived.

That wind stirred the few grains of dust that were about. (It was an astonishingly clean house, for one sealed so long, from which servants had long since fled.) It swept down the halls and into another room, and touched at the face of a man who slept… likewise very long. In that darkness, in that silence in which the mere arrival of a breeze was remarkable, that cold and handsome face lost its corpselike rigor; the nostrils widened. The eyes opened, long lashed, mere slits. The chest heaved with a wider breath.