Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

Tros horse broke stride, looking reproachfully about at him to see what that

shift of weight could possibly be construed to mean.

Tempus stopped the horse in the middle of the cool shadowed way on that

beautiful morning and sat stiffly a long while, conducting an internal battle

which had no resolution.

After a time, he swung the horse back in its tracks, kicked it into a lope

towards the barracks from which he had just come. Let her stay with One-Thumb,

if she would. She had come between him and his god before. He was not ready to

give her to the god, and he was not ready to give himself back into the hands of

his curse, rip asunder what had been so laboriously patched together and at such

great cost. He thought of Abarsis, and Kadakithis, and the refractory upcountry

peoples, and he promised Vashanka any other woman the god should care to choose

before sundown. Cime would keep, no doubt, right where she was. He would see to

it that Lastel saw to her.

Abarsis’s Tros horse snorted softly, as if in agreement, single-footing through

Sanctuary’s better streets towards the barracks. But the Tros horse could not

have known that by this simple decision its rider had attained to a greater

victory than in all the wars of all the empires he had ever laboured to

increase. Now the Tros horse whose belly quivered between Tempus’s knees as it

issued a blaring trumpet to the dusty air did so not because of its rider’s

triumph over self and god, but out of pure high spirits, as horses always will

praise a fine day dawned.