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

a rooftop and waved a torch.

“Snakes,” Ischade whispered, in bed with her lover. She kissed him gently and

disengaged his fingers from her hair. “You ever put it together, Strat, that

both Nisibis and the Beysib are fond of snakes?”

He recalled a serpentine body rolling under his heel, a frantic moment the other

side of Roxane’s window.

“Coincidences,” Ischade said. “That’s possible of course. True coincidences are

a rare thing, though. You know that. You don’t believe in them any more than I

do, being no fool at all.”

Stilcho stopped, moving carefully now. Haught’s hand sought his arm. “They’re

here,” Haught said.

“They’ve been here for some time,” Stilcho said of the shadows that shifted and

twisted, blacker than other shadows. “We’ve crossed the line. You want to do the

talking?”

“Don’t try me. Don’t try me, Stilcho.”

“You think you’re powerful enough to walk through the Shambles now and deal with

all the ghosts at once. Do it, why don’t you? Or why’d you bring me?”

Haught’s fingers bit painfully into his arm. “You talk to them, I say.”

No more remarks about his mother. Stilcho turned his head with deliberate

slowness and looked at the gathering menace. No one alive was on the street but

Haught. And himself. And many of these were Roxane’s. Many were not-just lost

souls left unattended and lately, in the lamentable condition of Sanctuary,

without compulsion to go back to rest.

“I’m Stilcho,” he said to them. And he took what he carried, a waterskin, and

poured some of the contents on the road. But it was not water that pooled and