Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

The sleeper fell back again, slack-limbed; Haught collapsed by the window in the front room, and by the time he was conscious enough to lift himself on his arms and assess the damage, all the air seemed still and numb, his hearing blasted by a sound which never might have been sound at all.

He gathered himself up and clung to the sill, and lifted himself further, trembling. He stood there in that condition till it was all quiet again, stood there till the shadowed figures went their way from the ruin across the street, and he dared finally move the window and shut it again.

A hand descended on his shoulder and he whirled and let out a scream that made it very fortunate that the party across the street had dispersed.

The calm, handsome face that stared so closely into his- smiled. It was not the smile of the man who had owned the body. It was not that of the witch who lived there now. Nothing sane was at home within that shell. Haught was a mage, still.

Against another threat he might fling out some power, even with the crippling of magic throughout the town; he was still formidable.

But what slept behind those eyes, what wandered there sometimes sane and sometimes not, and sometimes one mind and sometimes another… was death. It had reasons, if it remembered them, to take a slow revenge; and to hurl magic against the wards (he felt them restored) which held that soul in-

Haught prayed to his distant gods and cringed against the shutters, made an unwanted rattle and flinched again. Ischade had been there. Ischade had been near enough long enough that perhaps this thing that looked like Tasfalen would pick that up; and remember its intentions again in some rage to blast wards and souls at once.