Thieves World 5 – The Face of Chaos by Asprin, Robert

for a year to a Nisibisi mage – her lover-lord. There was a string on Nikodemos,

ready to be pulled.

And when he felt it, it would be too late, and she would be at the end of it.

Tempus had allowed Niko to breed his sorrel mare to his own Tros stallion to

quell mutters among knowledgeable Stepsons that assigning Niko and Janni to

hazardous duty in the town was their commander’s way of punishing the slate

haired fighter who had declined Tempus’s offered pairbond in favour of Janni’s

and had subsequently quit their ranks.

Now the mare was pregnant and Tempus was curious as to what kind of foal the

union might produce, but rumours of foul play still abounded.

Critias, Tempus’s second in command, had paused in his dour report and now

stirred his posset of cooling wine and barley and goat’s cheese with a finger,

then wiped the finger on his bossed cuirass, burnished from years of use. They

were meeting in the mercenaries’ guild hostel, in its common room, dark as

congealing blood and safe as a grave, where Tempus had bade the veteran

mercenary lodge – an operations officer charged with secret actions could be no

part of the Stepsons’ barracks cohort. They met covertly, on occasion; most

times, coded messages brought by unwitting couriers were enough.

Crit, too, it seemed, thought Tempus wrong in sending Janni, a guileless

cavalryman, and Niko, the youngest of the Stepsons, to spy upon the witch:

clandestine schemes were Crit’s province, and Tempus had usurped, overstepped

the bounds of their agreement. Tempus had allowed that Crit might take over