Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

Sanctuary and hurtling free. But she moved the lamp and set it on the little niche shelf, and it made her body all shadows and flesh tones, her hair all wispy gold, all over. The magic that Haught worked had been thorough. She had still the look of a Rankene lady, however fallen.

She needed him, in this place. He persuaded himself of that. He needed her, desperately. At times he feared he was going mad. At others he feared that he was already mad.

And at the worst times he dreamed that she might wake and discover a corpse by her, the soul dragged back to hell and the body suffering whatever changes two years might have wrought in it, in its natural grave.

Day, brutal heat in the still air that settled in over Sanctuary since the rains. Shoppers at market were few and listless; merchants sat fanning themselves and keeping to the shade, while vegetables ripened and rotted and the remaining few fish did the same. There was trouble in the scarred town. The rumor ran up from Downwind and down from the hill, and all the byways murmured with the same names, furtively delivered.

High up on the hill an officer of the city garrison met with higher authority, and received orders to carry elsewhere.

In Ratfall there was a certain stirring, and certain merchants received warnings.

And a furtive woman went out on the streets to steal again, in gnawing terror, knowing her skills were not what they had been, and knowing that the man she had taken up with was approaching some crisis she did not understand. For this woman there must always be some man; she was adrift without that focus, shortsighted, on some life that made hers matter; she wanted love, did this woman, and kept finding men who needed her-or who needed, at any rate… and who lacked something. Moria knew need when she saw it, and went to that in a man like iron to a lodestone, and never understood why her men always failed her, and why she always ended giving away all she had for men who gave nothing back.