Free Shadows of Sanctuary978-0441806010 by Robert Asprin, Lynn Abbey Page A

from fastidiousness, as he came from the opposite direction down the web of dark ways. A handsome fellow was Sjekso Kinzan, a blond youth with curling locks, a short and carefully kept beard, his shirt and jerkin open from the recent heat of the common room of the Vulgar Unicorn - from the heat, and, truth be told, from a certain vanity. He radiated sex, wine vapours, and a certain peevishness: was out of pocket from the dice, had lost even Minsy's purchasable favours to a bad throw ... his absolute nadir of discomfort. Minsy was off with that whoreson Hanse, while heHe staggered his hazed way back towards his lodgings and his own doorway off the Serpentine. He snuffed and faltered and lamented his misfortune with himself. He hated Hanse, at least for the evening, and plotted elaborate and public revenge...
    And blinking in the vapours up from the harbour and in the Uncertain focus of his eyes, he found his way intersected with a woman's in the alleyway. No ordinary doxy, this: a courtesan of quality strayed from some rendezvous, an opportunity some fickle god had tossed into his path or him into hers.
    'Well,' he said, and flung wide his arms, leaned from one side of the way to the other to block her attempt to walk around him ... a little fun, he reckoned. And again, owlishly: 'Well.'-but she made a quick move to go past him and he seized her in that swift pass, grabbed and grasped and felt female roundnesses in delightful proportions. His prey writhed and pushed and kneed at him, and he gripped her hair through the hood, drew her head back and kissed her with fair aim and rising passion.
    She struggled, which motion only felt the better in his hands, and she gave out muffled cries, which were far from loud, his mouth covering hers the while. He held her tight and sought with his eyes for some more convenient alcove among the broken amphorae and barrels, a place where they might not be disturbed. All at once another sound penetrated the fog of sense and sound, the scuff of another foot near him. Sjekso started to spin himself and his victim about, went the least bit over to that foot and had a hand clamped on to his own chin, his head jerked back, and a deadly keen blade at his throat in the same instant.
    'Let the lady go,' a male whisper suggested, and he carefully, trading in all his remaining advantage, relaxed his hands and let them fall, wondering wildly all the while whether his only chance might be in some wild try at escape. The woman in the edge of his vision stepped back, brushed at her robes, adjusted her hood. The knife rode razor-edged at his throat and the hand which held his chin gave him nothing.
    Mradhon Vis kept his grip and held the ruffian just off his balance, looked in a moment's distraction at the lady in question ... at a severe and dusky face in the faint light of the alleyway. She was beautiful. His romantical soul was touched - that seldom-afforded self which launched itself mostly in the wake of more profitable motives. 'Be off,' he told Sjekso, and flung the villain a good several body lengths down the alley; and Sjekso scrambled up and set to his heels without stopping to see anything.
    'Wait!' the woman called after Sjekso. The would-be rapist spun about with his back to a wall, ducking an imagined blow from behind. Mradhon Vis, dagger still in hand, stood facing him, utterly confounded.
    'The boy and I are old friends,' she said - and to Sjekso: 'Isn't it so?'
    Sjekso straightened with his back against the wall and managed a bow, if a wobbling one ... managed a sneer, his braggadocio recovered in the face of a man he, after all, knew from the dice table that night - and Mradhon Vis took a tighter and furious grip on his dagger, knowing this vermin at least from the tables at the Unicorn.
    But feminine fingers touched very lightly on his bare arm. 'A misunderstanding,'
    the woman said, very soft and low. 'But thank you for stepping in, all the same. You have some skill, don't you? Out of the