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

alley. When the door closed above the men, Samlor set the potential firebomb in

a corner where it was not likely to be bumped.

‘Sorry,’ said the caravan-master with a nod towards the leader and the blotted

page. ‘I needed to talk to you, and there wasn’t much choice. My niece was

stolen last month, not by you, but by Beysibs. Some screwball cult of them

fishermen.’

‘Who told you where I was?’ asked the black man in a voice whose mildness would

not have deceived a child.

‘A fellow in Ranke, one eye, limps,’ Samlor lied with a shrug. ‘He’d worked for

you but ran when the roof fell in.’

The leader’s fists clenched. ‘The password – he didn’t tell you that!’

‘I just mumbled my name. Your boys heard what they expected.’ Samlor

deliberately turned his back on the outlaw to end the line of discussion. ‘You

won’t have contacts with their religious loonies, not directly. But you’ll know

their thieves, and a thief wili’ve heard something, know something. Sell me a

Beysib thief, leader. Sell me a thief from the Setmur clan.’

The other man laughed. ‘Sell? What are you offering to pay?’

Samlor turned, shrugging. ‘The price of a four year old girl? That’d run to

about four coronations in Ranke, but you know the local market better. Or the

profit on the thief you give me. Figure what he’ll bring you in a lifetime …

Name a figure, leader. I don’t expect you to realize what this giri means to n”,

but – name a figure.’

‘I won’t give you a thief,’ said the masked man. He paused deliberately and

raised a restraining finger, though the Cirdonian had not moved. ‘And I won’t