Free Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune by Lynn Abbey

know what happens when you mix bleach and vinegar?” Lone laughed again, this time with clear pleasure. “Deadly poison. One whiff, Dysan. That’s all it takes.”
    Dysan imagined the priests calling upon their hideous, twisted Mother, their hands mottled and sticky with tattoos, red ink, and blood. As the last ingredient entered the pot, they all sucked in a deep breath, seeking strength and finding only the death they had inflicted on so many others. He only hoped it was a painful way to die. He looked to Lone to ask him, but the other man had already melted into the growing shadows. Where he had once stood, Dysan saw nil, nothing.
    A smile on his face, Dysan ignored the pain still throbbing through his neck. His mothers would wonder about the tear in his tunic, the scratch on his belly, the bruises in the shape of fingers across his throat, but they would accept whatever explanation he gave them.
    Then, they would feed him.

Pricks and Afflictions

     
     
    Dennis L. McKiernan
     
     
     
    Two words of many meanings …
    G log!
    The wave shoved Rogi down again, and a great bubble exploded from his mouth as he spat the oath underwater: “Thshite!”
    Rogi fought his way upward, yet even as he broke through the surface— thnk! —the box slammed into the back of his head.
    Down went Rogi once more, the little hunchback now caught in the undertow and dragged along the mud and silt and sand.
    In spite of his panic, in spite of clawing for purchase even as the powerful riptide slammed him repeatedly into the bottom and rolled him and tossed him somersaulting, Ith thith the end of Rogi? he wondered.
    Just moments before, as he’d stumped along the western shore of the White Foal and swatted mosquitoes and shooed away gnats and picked off leeches while he hunted the rats who frequented the fringes of the Swamp of Night Secrets, rats that occasionally came out from the reeds to the shoreline to hunt small crustaceans and perhaps lick salt from the rocks, as the sinking sun hung low in the sky, Rogi had “thspotted a chetht” tossing to and fro in the whitecaps and tricky currents ’round the Hag’s Teeth, there where the furious rush of the White Foal met the cold surge of the sea. He saw the curious markings—runes mayhap—carven into the sides, and he guessed that it was something “thpethial.” Perhaps the rumors were true about the strange wreck out on the Seaweal Reefs; maybe this chest had come from there. Quickly, Rogi had stripped off his clothes, pausing momentarily to admire his dragon, and then he had plunged headlong into the heavy waves yet cresting from a blow somewhere far out to sea. The shock of the cold water shrank his dragon down to minuscule proportions, but Rogi persevered, swimming an ungainly sidestroke against the white-crested billows rolling in from the south, and the swirling, gurgling river current rushing down from the north. With water cascading over him and the long red hair growing only on the right side of his head whipping about in the currents, gasping between crests, he made his way outward to fetch this curious artifact … or so he hoped it might be. After all, if it were “thomthing thpethial” his “mathter” would reward him handsomely … perhaps even enough to visit the ladies above the Yellow Lantern and make his dragon happy.
    But then a breaker had smashed him under and a swell had lifted him up and he had been hit in the back of the head by the box, and another roller had hammered him under again, where the undertow had grabbed him and hurled him along the bottom. And he had no air, yet needed to breathe, but could not, deep down as he was. And as he tumbled, the swift-running undercurrent crashed him against the skeletal ribs of the rotted remains of a longdrowned hulk, its keel deeply buried in the muck.
    Desperately, Rogi grabbed at the wooden beam and managed to hang on, and then, as if climbing a tree, he shimmied his way up the curved member, his diaphragm