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

improbability of efreets and krrf-dreams.

They came and went. Her face did. Her mouth hovered close and spoke words and he

could read lips, but he could not read that, as if she spoke some language he

knew and did not know when he was awake, or his brain would not let him put the

sounds together.

And no man had nights like that, no one could, and have another and another and

pay no penalties.

There were sore places; there were marks-(witch-marks?) bites and scratches that

confirmed part of what he remembered; could a man’s soul leak out through such

little wounds?

A spider had spun an elaborate web over by the light-vent, across the slats. He

found it uncomfortably ominous. He went and flung it down and crushed the spider

under his heel; and felt a chill greater than the killing in the barracks had

given him.

“Stilcho.” It took an expenditure of energy to bring him back. Ischade put her

hands on the Stepson and searched deep down the long threads that led where he

had gone; and pulled, and rewove, and brought him up again, there on the cold

ground beneath the scraggly roses and the brush. “Stilcho. Fool. Come up and let

go.”

He wept-tears from one eye and a thin, reddish fluid from the missing one. And

he did come back-came rushing back all at once and into the world with a scream

that would have drawn attention in any town but Sanctuary and in any

neighborhood but this one.

“Well,” she said, sitting there with her arms about her | knees and regarding

this least willing of her servants, i “And where were you?”