Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

Snapper Jo was a fiend of the gray-and-warty-skinned, snaggle-toothed variety.

His shock of orange hair stood out every which way from his head and his eyes looked in both directions at once, causing distress to certain patrons who wondered which orb to fix on when they earnestly begged for credit or leave to pass upstairs, where drugs and women could be had.

Snapper’s job of bartending in the day at the Vulgar Unicorn was his most prized accomplishment-save the winning of his freedom.

He’d been the summoned minion of Roxane, the Nisibisi witch called Death’s

Queen. But his mistress had freed him, after her fashion… or, at least, she’d not come around lately to order him to this or that foul depradation.

The fact that Snapper thought of his former existence as a. witch’s servant as depradacious was central to the fiend’s new outlook on life. Here, among the

Wrigglies and the mendicants and the whores, he was trying desperately for acceptance.

And he was managing.. No one teased him about his looks or shrank from him in fear. They were civil, in the manner of humans, and they treated him as an equal, to the extent that anyone here ever treated anyone else so.

And, in his heart of hearts, Snapper Jo wanted above all to be accepted by the humans-perhaps, someday, as a human. For was not humanity something in the heart, not on the surface?

Snapper Jo wanted to believe it so, in this weird inn where pop-eyed Beysibs were hated marginally more than blond and handsome Rankans, where dark skin and uneven limbs and snaggle teeth weren’t disfigurements; where everyone was equally oppressed by the wizards from the Mageguild and the priests from uptown.