Thieves World 01 – Thieves World by Asprin, Robert

from Ranke on the other side. One of them, by ill chance, was relieving himself

behind a flowering shrub as she descended, and needed to do no more than thrust

the haft of his pike between her legs. She gasped and went sprawling.

But Melilot had foreseen all this, and she was prepared with her story and the

evidence to back it up.

‘Don’t hurt me, please! I don’t mean any harm!’ she whimpered, making her voice

as childish as possible. There was a torch guttering in a sconce nearby; the

soldier heaved her to her feet by her right wrist, his grip as cruel as a

trap’s, and forced her towards it. A sergeant appeared from the direction of the

pavilions which since her last visit had sprouted like mushrooms between the

entry to the Hall of Justice and the clustered granaries on the north-west side

of the grounds.

‘What you got?’ he rumbled in a threatening bass voice.

‘Sir, I mean no harm! I have to do what my mistress tells me, or I’ll be nailed

to the temple door!’

That took both of them aback. The soldier somewhat relaxed his fingers and the

sergeant bent close to look her over better in the wan torchlight.

‘By that, I take it you serve a priestess of Argash?’ he said eventually.

It was a logical deduction. On the twenty-foot-high fane of that divinity his

most devoted followers volunteered, when life wearied them, to be hung up and

fast unto death.

But Jarveena shook her head violently.

‘N-no, sir! Dyareela!’ naming a goddess banned these thirty years owing to the

bloodthirstiness of her votaries.

The sergeant frowned. ‘I saw no shrine to’her when we escorted the prince along