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

All he heard was the witch’s voice; all he remembered was the horror of her eyes

and the message she bade him give to Tempus, and when he had repeated it, she

pulled the splinters from his lids … The darkness she allowed him became

complete, and he found a danker rest-place than meditation’s quiet cave.

In Roxane’s ‘manor house’ commotion raged; slaves went running and men cried

orders, and in the court the caravan was being readied to make away.

She herself sat petulant and wroth, among the brocades of her study and the

implements other craft: water and fire and earth and air, and minerals and

plants, and a globe sculpted from high peaks clay with precious stones inset.

A wave of hand would serve to load these in her wagon. The house spells’ undoing

would take much less than that – a finger’s wave, a word unsaid, and all would

be no more than it appeared: rickety and threadbare. But the evening’s errors

and all the work she’d done to amend them had drained her strength.

She sat, and Niko, in a corner, propped up but not awake, breathed raspingly:

another error – those damn snakes took everything too literally, as well as

being incapable of following simple orders to their completion.

The snakes she’d sent out, charmed to look like Stepsons, should have found the

children in the streets; as Niko and Janni, their disguises were complete. But a

vampire bitch, a cursed and accursed third-rater possessed of meagre spells, had

chanced upon the quarry and taken it home. Then she’d had to change all plans