Thieves World 4 – Storm Season by Asprin, Robert

longer had the courage (or the contractual protective wardings) to dare a

reprisal against a Hazard-class mage.

Of all the enchanters in wizard-ridden Sanctuary, only three were archmages,

nameless adepts beyond summoning or responsibility, and this Hazard was one. In

fact, he was the very strongest of those three. When he had been young, he had

had a name, but he will forget it, and everything else, quite promptly: the

domed and spired estuary of venality which is Sanctuary, nadir of the empire

called Ranke; the unmitigated evil he had fielded for decades from his swamp

encircled Mageguild fortress; the compromises he had made to hold sway over

curmudgeon, courtesan and criminal (so audacious that even the bounds of magics

and planeworlds had been eroded by his efforts, and his fellow adepts felled on

occasion by demons roused from forbidden defiles to do his bidding here at the

end of creation where no balance remains between logic and faith, law and

nature, or heaven and hell); the disingenuous methods through which his will was

worked, plan by tortuous plan, upon a town so hateful and immoral that both the

flaunted gods and magicians’ devils agreed that its inhabitants deserved no less

dastardly a fate-all of this, and more, will fade from him in the time it takes

a star to burn out, falling from the sky.

Now, the First Hazard glimpses her movement, though he is close to ejaculation,

sputtering with sensations that for years he has assumed he had outgrown, or

forgotten how to feel. Senility creeps upon the finest flesh when a body is