Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

his throat, a silver coiled serpent… a gift, a protection against spells,

more efficacious than most priest-blessed gimcrack tokens …. under its own

terms. He saw, with a touch of unease the greater because no one else in the

room seemed to see … how Mradhon Vis and his dark companion moved, with

common purpose and peculiar menace.

Strangeness enough progressed in Sanctuary … deaths which made a man naturally

think on protections of the sorcerous kind, and to be glad of them if he had

them, because where the powerful died, wizardry was about, selective of its

victims thus far, but not – perhaps – exclusive of them. There was Sjekso

Kinzan, who had been no one. Cappen wondered did such protection as he possessed

… protect or mark him; and as the lady and Mradhon Vis came past his table by

the door –

A moment Cappen was looking up and the lady looked down at him, more familiar in

that stare than he would have liked. The prickling about the amulet became

strong indeed while he stared, lost in those dark eyes with a sense of deadly

peril, of his whole life resting loose and endangered, as if some small nudge on

anyone’s pan might tumble it. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he murmured, because three

truths was the rule of the amulet if it was to work at all – ‘You’re dangerous

and foreign here.’

She lingered, and reaching down picked up his cup where it sat; lilted it,

sipped and set it down again, all with an eerie hint of humour or menace

flaunted at him, at him who alone in the room but Mradhon Vis – or was he