Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

man-like after the fashion of her clan-brothers, she would conceive.

She knelt on the soft bed-cushions they provided her, rocking back and forth

until tears flowed down her face; silent tears lest her guardians hear and force

a drugged potion down her throat. Calling on the sungod, the moongod, the god

who tended the herds in the night and every other shadowy demon she could

remember from the days before the slave-pens, Seylalha repeated her prayers:

‘Let me conceive. Let me bear the god’s child. Let me live! K-eep me from

becoming one of themF

In the distance, beyond walls and locked door, she could hear her less fortunate

sisters speaking to each other on their tambours, lyres, pipes and clatter

sticks. They’d danced their dance and lost their tongues; their wombs were

filled with bile. Their music was a mournful, bitter dirge – it told her fate if

she did not bear a child.

As the tears dried she arched her back until her forehead rested on the soft

mass of her hair beneath her. Then, in rhythm to the distant conversation, she

began her dance again.

3

Molin paced around the marble-topped table he had brought with him from the

capital. The mute who always attended him hid in the far corners of the room.

Molin’s wrath had touched him three times and it was not yet high-noon.

The injustice, the indignity of being the supreme priest of Vashanka in a sink

hole like Sanctuary. Construction lagged on the temple: inept crews, unforeseen

accidents, horrendous omens. The old Ilsig hierarchy gloated and collected the