Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

Mriga shrugged. Rahi traditionally spoke in a long gasp with a laugh at the end, and dropped out words as if he was afraid to run out of them some day. “Hey,

Rahi, if it gets slow over here I can always go over to the wall and sharpen the chisels, eh?”

Rahi was shaking out the canopy, a six-foot rectangle of light cotton with some long-faded pattern just barely visible in the weave. “No good’ll come of that, mark,” he said, “didn’t need the wall until now, what for? But to hold out armies, or hold people in. Put a lock on a door and people start thinking there’s things to steal, sure. That-the Torch-” He was plainly unwilling to say

Molin Torchholder’s name aloud. That was no surprise; many people were.

Sanctuary was full of ears, and there was frequently no telling who they belonged to. “Playing kingmaker, that one. If he doesn’t get us burnt in our beds…” Rahi trailed off into grumbling. “Your man, how about him, eh?”

“He’s doing all right. Word’s been getting about that there’s a good barber to be had in the Maze. We haven’t even been robbed yet…. They let us be, seeing as how it might be Harran that has to patch one of them up some night after a job goes sour.”

“Doesn’t do to have the barber mad at you, no indeed; pots! Pots to sell!” Rahi shouted suddenly, as a housewife with a thumbsucking child in tow went by the stall. “Other lady, the tall one, she leams that too? No? ‘Spose not, doesn’t seem the ‘prenticing type, too proud, she.”

Mriga silently agreed. While still active in the Ilsig pantheon, Siveni had invented many a craft and passed them on to men. Medicine, the sciences, the fine arts, the making and using of weapons, all had been hers. Trapped in the world Siveni might be, but what she knew of the spells and arts of medicine was far more than the best of her priest-healers had known; and Harran had been only a minor one of those. “No,” Mriga said, “she’s on the wall. She does well enough.”