Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

“Talk with me? You call this talk?” Zip’s voice was shaking, but Sync wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was with rage or fear. At that moment, Zip himself couldn’t have said which. Blood was all around him, sticky and warm and smelling all too human; the corpse beside him had farted, and worse, once death loosed its bowels.

On his hands and knees in blood and shit. Zip was thinking that this was probably it-the death he’d earned, in circumstances he’d dreamed too often. He waited to see if it was a blade from behind that would do the talking.

A sandal splashed in the blood by his hand; Sync’s Rankan-accented voice said,

“That’s right, talk. If your man here had talked before he acted, he’d be alive now.” A gloved hand reached down for him; above it, a bracer with the 3rd’s unit device of a rearing horse with arrows in its mouth gleamed-silver, polished, spotless, and whispering of a cruelty so legendary that even the Rankans were afraid to use the 3rd Commando.

Even Theron, who’d come to the throne by way of their swords, if rumor was truth, wanted the 3rd disbanded or under a tight rein. That was why, some said,

Tempus, who had created them, had got them back: No one else could control them.

Left to their own, they’d slaughter Rankan emperors one by one and auction the throne to the highest bidder-Zip had heard Sync and Kama joke about it when the three were drunk.

Zip let Sync help him up, busy trying to wipe the sticky blood from his palms.

He didn’t argue about the dead sentry: You didn’t argue with Sync, not over something as immutable as the already-dead. You saved it for the plans that could get you killed.