Thieves World 8 – Soul of the City by Asprin, Robert

Her house showed signs of her indisposition. The black roses brawled with each

other, sending up bloomless canes armed with wicked thorns that flaked the

rusted iron fence where they rubbed against it. And the wards? Ischade shuddered

at the sight of the heavy blotches of power smeared stridently across her

personal domain. With small movements of her hands, hands now less powerful but

once again skilled and certain, she constrained the roses and reshaped the wards

into a more acceptable pattern.

The gate swung open to greet her; the raven preceded her to the porch.

Once across the threshold, Ischade kicked the heavy-soled boots the Beysib

soldier had given her into a comer where, in time, her magic would twist them

into something delicate and brightly colored. She retrieved her candles, lit

them, and settled into the small mountain of shimmering silk that was, in the

final sense, her home.

Inhaling the familiarity-the lightness-of it, she gathered the tangled skein of

imaginary silk which bound the Peres house to her and studied her options. She

touched each strand gently, so gently that no one in the uptown house would

suspect her interest as she reacquainted herself with what rightly belonged to

her. Then she drew the thread that bound her to Straton as surely as it bound

him to her.

Straton!

Ischade lived at the fringes of time, as she lived at the fringes of the greater

magics practiced by the likes of Roxane or even Randal. She was older than she

looked; probably older than she remembered. Straton was not the first who cut