Free Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 by Robert Asprin Page B

Knowing that it wouldn't have taken more than a half hour for the sentry to have completely bled out didn't help Zip's frame of mind: Sync's people were probably watching him from the adjacent ramshackle buildings Zip called his stronghold.
    The 3rd Commando leader, Sync, said quietly from behind him: "Got a minute, sonny? Some people here want to talk with you."
    The words weighed on Zip like burial stones and his own pulse threatened to choke him. Through the entire winter, Sync's rangers had never rousted him. The 3rd's leader had professed autonomy, pretended friendship, left Zip's PFLS to its own devices-as long as it followed an occasional suggestion from the 3rd's cold-blooded leader.
    But there had been talk of an alliance then-before Theron had visited Ranke; before Zip's faction had recruited too many and developed factions within its own ranks; before some fools among them had captured Illyra, the S'danzo, and killed a S'danzo child; before an arrow aimed at Straton had been laid at Zip's doorstep; before Kama had left Zip's bed and taken up with Torchholder, the palace priest; before a falling out with Jubal over a slave girl Zip had liberated... before things had just gotten too damned complicated, because Zip couldn't hold the territory he'd gained across the White Foal, territory he'd never wanted, like he'd never wanted to be so damned visible (and thus targeted) as Sync's behind-the-scenes maneuvering had made him.
    "Talk with me? You call this talk?" Zip's voice was shaking, but Sync wouldn't be able to tell whether it was with rage or fear. At that moment, Zip himself couldn't have said which. Blood was all around him, sticky and warm and smelling all too human; the corpse beside him had farted, and worse, once death loosed its bowels.
    On his hands and knees in blood and shit. Zip was thinking that this was probably it-the death he'd earned, in circumstances he'd dreamed too often. He waited to see if it was a blade from behind that would do the talking. A sandal splashed in the blood by his hand; Sync's Rankan-accented voice said,
    "That's right, talk. If your man here had talked before he acted, he'd be alive now." A gloved hand reached down for him; above it, a bracer with the 3rd's unit device of a rearing horse with arrows in its mouth gleamed-silver, polished, spotless, and whispering of a cruelty so legendary that even the Rankans were afraid to use the 3rd Commando.
    Even Theron, who'd come to the throne by way of their swords, if rumor was truth, wanted the 3rd disbanded or under a tight rein. That was why, some said, Tempus, who had created them, had got them back: No one else could control them. Left to their own, they'd slaughter Rankan emperors one by one and auction the throne to the highest bidder-Zip had heard Sync and Kama joke about it when the three were drunk.
    Zip let Sync help him up, busy trying to wipe the sticky blood from his palms. He didn't argue about the dead sentry: You didn't argue with Sync, not over something as immutable as the already-dead. You saved it for the plans that could get you killed.
    The rest were emerging now: at least twenty fighters-the 3rd never traveled light.
    The sight of Kama in her battle dress, with the 3rd's red insignia burned into hardened leather above her right breast and campaign designators scratched below it, made his stomach lurch.
    She was unfinished business, would always be. He said, "So, here I am. Talk," and found his tongue unwieldy.
    Around her, he realized (as his eyes accustomed themselves to something other than the dead man, handless and footless, who still flopped helplessly in his inner sight), were others of the uptown gangs who masqueraded as authority in Sanctuary: Critias, a covert actionist from the Sacred Band who seldom ventured forth in uniform and never in daylight; Straton, his wide-shouldered, witch ridden partner; Jubal, black as Ischade's cloak and with a look on his face much blacker; Walegrin, the regular army's