Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

pickpocket or pander; usurer and sorcerer scuttled in haste from street to

doorway, where before they had swaggered virtually unchallenged, crime lords in

fear of nothing.

Now the whores walked bowlegged, dreamy-eyed, parading their new finery in the

early hours of the morning while most mercenaries slept; the taverns changed

shifts but feared to close their doors, lest a mercenary find that an excuse to

take offence. Even so early in the day, the inns were full of brawls and the

gutters full of casualties. The garrison soldiers and the Hell Hounds could not

be omnipresent: wherever they were not, mercenaries took sport, and they were

not in the Maze this morning.

Though Sanctuary had never been so prosperous, every guild and union and

citizens’ group had sent representatives to the palace at sunrise to complain.

Lastel, a.k.a. One-Thumb, could not understand why the Sanctuarites were so

unhappy. Lastel was very happy: he was alive and back at the Vulgar Unicorn

tending bar, and the Unicorn was making money, and money made Lastel happy,

always. Being alive was something Lastel had not fully appreciated until

recently, when he had spent aeons dying a subjective death in thrall to a spell

he had paid to have laid upon his own person, a spell turned against him by the

sons of its deceased creator, Mizraith of the Hazard class, and dispelled by he

knew not whom. Though every night he expected his mysterious benefactor to sidle

up to the bar and demand payment, no one ever came and said: ‘Lastel, I saved