Thieves World 3 – Shadows of Sanctuary by Asprin, Robert

wells who walked the Maze; possessed a grace surpassing most – in any situation.

But not in walking the Maze by dark and unseen. Hanse was in his element, and

Cappen followed him artlessly, down the length of the Serpentine, and

into territory of the city at large – where the law came, and where a wanted

thief was less than safe. The houses and shops here were more sturdy, and

finally magnificent, and those latter existed behind walls, and most with bars

on the windows. Walkers grew scarce for a time, and Cappen hung further

back, afraid that he himself might attract the notice of the pair Hanse

followed … which he earnestly did not want.

One street and another, and sometimes a passage through narrower ways where

Cappen found Hanse going more carefully, where they four were virtually alone

and where a false move could alert the pair ahead. Cappen stayed far back then,

and once he thought he had lost them all… but a quick move around a comer put

them all in view again. Hanse looked back in that instant, while Cappen tried to

stay inconspicuously part of a stack of barrels, recalling Hanse’s knives, and

the murk of the night. The fog was coming on and the light played tricks; a

light mist slicked the stones … and still the pair kept moving, out of the

merchant quarter and into the quarter of the gods, past the square of the

Promise of Heaven, where prostitutes, bedraggled in the mist, sat their

accustomed benches like rain-soaked birds. – They swung past this place and into

the Avenue of Temples itself; and Cappen shrugged his cloak about him with a