Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

She’d run down the path and thrown herself up on her saddle before the door opened again.

Anything the man in the doorway might have shouted was drowned out by the mare’s thundering hooves as Kama slapped her unmercifully with the reins, headed toward the Stepsons’ barracks at a dead run.

There was nothing Crit could tell her that she wanted to hear-except perhaps why she could forgive Zip, who had betrayed her and tried to pin Strat’s attempted murder on her, when she couldn’t forgive Crit, who had wanted to marry her and have a child with her.

* * *

Tasfalen’s uptown estate had once been luxurious and fine, the centerpiece of one of Sanctuary’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

Now it stood alone, blackened and charred but whole, while all around it skeletal remains of burned-out homes teetered for blocks, frameworks leaning on lumps of fused brick, so that occasionally a charcoaled timber snapped of its own weight and came crashing down to break an eerie silence that spread from here to the uptown house where the pillar of fire had once raged, and beyond.

Not even rats ran these streets at night, since the pillar of flame had cleansed an uptown house and all the witchery that once had centered in its velvet-hung bedroom.

But Tempus had called a meeting here, across the street from Tasfalen’s front door, in the dead of night-a meeting of those concerned, once all his preparations had been made.

The sleepless veteran was the only one unaffected by the hours he and his had kept this week in Sanctuary.