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

clambered her way onto the windowsill to perch there wobbling, and nosed the

shutter aside.

She saw the tall shape lurching across the street, with something slung over its

shoulder. Tyr’s nose was full of the smell of burning and blood from below her.

She added everything swiftly together-the tallness and the scorch and the meat

down there-and realized that he was bringing her dinner after all. Wildly

excited, she began to yip-Then horses came running at the tall one. Tyr’s

feelings about this were mixed. Horses kicked. But once one horse had stopped

kicking, and the tall one had given her some, and it had been very good. More

food? Tyr thought, as much as she ever thought anything. But the horses didn’t

stop when they got to the tall one and the meat. For a moment she couldn’t see

where the tall one was. Then the horses separated, and Tyr whimpered and sniffed

the air. She caught the tall one’s scent. But to her horror, the scent did

something she had never smelled it do before: it cooled. It thinned, and

vanished, and turned to meat. And the Presence, the something that made the

world alive, the Presence went away….

When the universe is destroyed before one’s eyes, one may well mourn. Tyr had no

idea of what mourning was, but she did it. Standing and shaking there on the

window-sill, anguished, she howled and howled. And when the horses got too close

and the tall things on them pointed at her, she panicked altogether and fell out

of the window, rolled bumping down the roof-gable and off it. The pain meant