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

There was a collective gasp from the crowd and Yorl drew back the curtain for

the third time. The Beysa was holding a small, bloody knife, while her serpent

wound around her arm. Turghurt was already dead. The crowd broke into cheering,

just as Yorl felt the sharp prick of fangs on his own neck.

Poison burned and gripped him in hands of red-hot iron. The sunlit courtyard

grew dim, then black. The homed gateway to the seventh level of paradise shone

before him. The ancient magician’s spirit stumbled forward and fell, with the

gate just beyond his reach.

Failure – and with the land of death almost within his grasp. He wept and

brushed the tears away with a shaggy paw. The room was dark and filled with the

odour from the pyre on which they’d immolated the criminal, depriving his spirit

of eternal life within the goddess Bey. And Yorl was left with only the memory

of death to sustain him.

VOTARY

David Drake

‘Hai!’ called the Beysib executioner as his left blade struck. The tip of his

victim’s index finger spun thirty feet across the Bazaar and pattered against

Samlor’s boot. ‘Hai!’ and the right sword lopped the ends off the fourth and

middle fingers together, so that the victim’s right hand ended in a straight

line, the four fingers all the length of the least, the only one to which a

fingernail remained for the moment. ‘Hai!’

The auction block in the centre of the Bazaar had been used for punishment

before, but this particular technique was new to Samlor hil Samt. It was new as

well to many of the longer-term residents of Sanctuary, judging from the