Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

11

Lavender and lemon dawn light bedizened the white-washed barracks’ walls and

coloured the palace parade grounds.

Tempus had been working all night, out at Jubal’s estate where he was quartering

his mercenaries away from town and Hell Hounds and Ilsig garrison personnel. He

had fifty there, but twenty of them were paired members of three different

Sacred Bands: Stepson’s legacy to him. The twenty had convinced the thirty

nonallied operatives that ‘Stepsons’ would be a good name for their squadron,

and for the cohort it would eventually command should things go as everyone

hoped.

He would keep the Sacred Band teams and spread the rest throughout the regular

army, and throughout the prince’s domain. They would find what clay they chose,

and mould a division from it of which the spirit of Abarsis, if it were not too

busy fighting theomachy’s battles in heaven, could look upon with pride. The men

had done Tempus proud, already, that night at

Jubal’s, and thereafter; and this evening when he had turned the comer round the

slave barracks the men were refitting for livestock, there it had been, a love

note written in lamb’s blood two cubits high on the encircling protective wall:

‘War is all and king of all, and all things come into being out of strife.’

Albeit they had not got it exactly right, he had smiled, for though the world

and the boyhood from out of which he had said such audacious things was gone to

time. Stepson, called Abarsis, and his legacy of example and followers made

Tempus think that perhaos (oh just perhaps) he, Tempus, had not been so