Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

Fear sharpened his eyesight, and he looked beyond the gathered luminaries to their troops, and farther: to where his rebels skulked. None of them would move to save him-the odds weren’t good enough.

And neither Ratfall nor Zip were worth saving, not at the kind of price the 3rd

Commando would exact, if the sentry was a good example.

And he was. They’d made sure of that, had his visitors.

As he took deep breaths and resolved to tell nothing to this corps of fancy fighters (including the Stepsons’ chief interrogator, Strat), Zip realized that something was indeed worth saving here: Behind the men, in the long shed against which 3rd Commando regulars leaned with studied insolence, was a store of incendiaries purchased from the Beysib glassmakers: bottles in which were alchemical concoctions that, once their wicks were lit and the bottles thrown, exploded with such force that the shards and flame and concussion from even one such bottle could clear a street-or a palace hall.

With or without him, the revolution could continue, as long as the Beysib glassblowers took the PFLS’s money and Ilsig will-to-fight held out.

So, having determined that he had something to lose. Zip said again, “Talk, I said. What do you think this is, an uptown dinner party?”

“No,” said the woman he didn’t know, the one with the hawkish bird upon her shoulder, “it’s a revolutionary council -a trial, actually: yours.”

When Kama came back from Ratfall, her eyes were red-rimmed and she was so disarrayed that she ran up Molin’s back stairs, hoping to have the girls draw her a bath so she could get the Zip-smell off her and the straw out of her hair before the Torch saw her.