Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

“Go to sleep.” If he came to her now she would feel the tension in him, and know his terror. But she got up, a creak of the rope-webbed underpinnings, and came up behind him, and pressed her sweaty, weary self against him, her arms about him. He shivered even so and felt those arms tense.

“Stilcho.” There was fear in her voice now. “Stilcho, what’s wrong?”

“A dream,” he said. “A dream, that’s all.” He held her arms in place, cherished her sticky, miserable heat against him. Heat of life. Heat of passion when they had the strength. Both had returned to him, along with his life. Only the eye that Moruth had taken-kept seeing. He had fled Ischade, fled mages, fled the agencies that used him as their messenger to hell. He was alive again, but one of his eyes was dead; and one looked on the living, but the other-

A third shiver. He had seen into hell tonight,

“Stilcho.”

He put his back to the window. It was hard to do, his naked shoulders vulnerable to the night air; and worse, his face turned to the room, with its deeper dark in which his living eye had no power. Then the dead one was most active, and what moved there suddenly took clearer shape.

“They’ve let something loose, oh gods, Moria, something’s gotten loose in the town-“

“What, what thing?” Moria the thief gripped his arms in hands gone hard and shook him for the little she could move him. “Stilcho, don’t, don’t, don’t!”

The baby squalled and shrieked, from the window down the shaft. The poor shared their violence and their tempers, lived in such indignities, the noise, the raised voices audible from apartment to apartment.