Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

he prince or king.’

The prince lost hold, then, having been ‘princed’ too often back in Ranke, and

berated the Hell Hound.

The man sat quite still upon the horse the prince had given him, garbed only in

his loinguard though the day was fading, letting his gaze full of festering

shadows rest in the prince’s until Kadakithis trailed off, saying, ‘… the

trouble with you is that anything they say about you could be true, so a man

knows not what to believe.’

‘Believe in accordance with your heart,’ the voice like grinding Stone

suggested, while the dark cloud came to hover over the beach.

It settled, seemingly, into the sand, and the horses shied back, necks

outstretched, nostrils huge. Tempus had his sorrel up alongside the

chariot team and was leaning down to take the lead-horse’s bridle when an

earsplitting clarion came from the cloud’s translucent centre.

The Hell Hound raised his head then, and Kadakithis saw him shiver, saw his brow

arch, saw a flicker of deepset eyes within their caves of bone and lid. Then

again Tempus spoke to the chariot horses, who swivelled their ears towards him

and took his counsel, and he let loose the lead-horse’s bridle and spurred his

own between Kadakithis’s chariot and what came out of the cinereous cloud which

had been so long descending upon them in opposition to the prevailing wind.

The man on the horse who could be seen within the cloud waved: a flash of

scarlet glove, a swirl of burgundy cloak. Behind his tasselled steed he led

another, and it was this second grey horse who again challenged the other