Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

watching, but the other way, towards the Serpentine. Hanse swore and slipped out

from his concealment, shadowed them most carefully in their course through the

debris of the alley and out on to the street. The moon was not yet up; the only

light came from the city itself, a vague glimmering on a bank of fog towards the

harbour which diffused across the sky and promised one of those nights in which

light spread through milky mist, from whatever sources – a thieves’ night, and a

worse to come.

The pair tended on up the Serpentine, bold as dockside whores … but odd sights

were common enough in the Maze by night, masks, cloaks, bright colours flaunted

by night when the kindly dark masked the signs of wear and their threadbare

condition. Man and woman, they were only conspicuous by their plainness, the

woman shrouded by the robe and hood so that she might be instead some night

prowling priest with an unlikely and rough guard.

Hanse followed, in and out among the occasional walkers on the street, a kind of

stalking at which he had some skill.

*

… So, well, it answered, at least, what Hanse had been up to, and upset all

Cappen Varra’s calculations about Hanse as bluster and no threat. Cappen stopped

at the corner with the trio in view, glanced over his own shoulder with a touch

of mad humour and the desperate thought that the whole was getting to be a

procession in the dark streets… the woman and Vis, and Hanse, and now himself

but at least there was no fifth person that he could see, following him.