Thieves World 7 – The Dead of Winter by Asprin, Robert

bothered to learn them.”

Janni stopped at least. Stood there on the path, silent, solid- and live

looking, give or take the blood that smeared his face. Janni wanted badly to be

back among the living, for reasons not all of which were savory. Love was one.

And it was never a savory kind of love, the dead for the living. Janni had not

learned that.

Stilcho had. In that improbably small house he knew himself supplanted by the

living-perhaps fatally.

“You’re Rankene,” Janni said. “You somehow forget that, boy?”

“I don’t forget a thing. Look at me and tell me what I can forget. Look what

happened to us for your sake, while you were off a-heroing and left us this

sinkhole. And you come home with thanks, do you? Straton slaughters my

barracksmates for failing your precious purity and your Niko, that paragon of

virtue, falls straight into bed with the Nisi witch-“

“Lie.”

“The witch who killed you, man. Where’s his virtue? Sent to hell with the likes

of me and you? I don’t bloody care!”

Ischade half-heard the whisperings of her ghosts outside the house, the true and

the half-dead; and ignored them for the living inside-for the warm and living

and far more attractive person of the third Stepson, whose name was Straton. He

gazed at her, his head on her silken pillow, in her silk-strewn bed-chief

interrogator, chief torturer, when the Stepsons had to apply that art-soldier by

preference. He was a big man, a moodish man of wry humors and the most delicate

skills with a body (one could guess where acquired), and he would survive this