Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

The ground rumbled and buckled and bucked and great crumbling cracks appeared in

its inner sanctum, where the slaver dallied with the glossy-haired eunuch

Kadakithis had just sent up for training. It was profligate waste to make a

fancy boy out of such a slave: the arena had muscled him up and time had grown

him up, and to squeeze the two or three remaining years of that sort of pleasure

out of him seemed to the slaver a pity. If truth be known, blood like his came

so rarely to the slavepens that gelding him was a sin against future

generations: had Jubal got him early on – when the cuts had been made, at nine,

or ten – he would have raised him with great pains and put him to stud. But his

brand and tawny skin smacked of northern mountains and high wizards’ keeps where

the wars had raged so savagely that no man was proud to remember what had been

done there, on either side.

Eventually, he left the eunuch chained by the neck to the foot of his bed and

went to see what the yelling and the shouting and the blue flashes and the

quivering floorboards could possibly mean.

What he saw from his threshold he did not understand, but he came striding back,

stripping off his robe as he passed by the bed, rushing to arm himself and do

battle against the infernal forces of this enemy, and, it seemed, the whole of

the night.

Naphtha fireballs came shooting over his walls into the courtyard; naming arrows

torqued from spring-wound bows; javelins and swordplay glittered nastily,

singing as they slew in soft susurrusings Jubal had hoped never to hear there.