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

On their way to work, Niko and Janni stopped at the Vulgar Unicorn to wait for

the moon to rise. The moon would be full this evening, a blessing since

anonymous death squads roamed the town -whether they were Rankan army regulars,

Jubal’s scattered hawk-masks, fish-eyed Beysib spoilers, or Nisibisi assassins,

none could say.

The one thing that could be said of them for certain was that they weren’t

Stepsons or Sacred Banders or nonaligned mercenaries from the guild hostel. But

there was no convincing the terrorized populace of that.

And Niko and Janni – under the guise of disaffected mercenaries who had quit the

Stepsons, been thrown out of the guild hostel for unspeakable acts, and were

currently degenerating Sanctuary-style in the filthy streets of the town thought

that they were close to identifying the death squads’ leader. Hopefully, this

evening or the next, they would be asked to join the murderers in their squalid

sport. ‘

Not that murder was uncommon in Sanctuary, or squalor. The Maze, now that Niko

knew it like his horses’ needs or Janni’s limits, was not the town’s true nadir,

only the multi-tiered slum’s upper echelon. Worse than the Maze was Shambles

Cross, filled with the weak and the meek; worse than the Shambles was Downwind,

where nothing moved in the light of day and at night hellish sounds rode the

stench on the prevailing east wind across the White Foal. A tri-level hell,

then, filled with murderers, sold souls and succubi, began here in the Maze.

If the death squads had confined themselves to Maze, Shambles, and Downwind, no