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And in that instant the cord broke.
Jake fell, butt first, his knees around his chin, as the dog hit the ground. The dog looked up just in time to see Jake's posterior blot out the sky, the instant before Jake landed upon its head.
The hound's jaw slammed into the stone courtyard surface with a lethal-sounding crack, and Jake felt the shock run up his spine, rattling his teeth.
For a second, Jake sat on the dog's head, unsure if he should move, then he scrambled off the creature as quickly as possible.
Could it be? Was the hound from hell dead?
Not waiting around to find out, Jake stood up and did a quick inventory. All his body parts were still attached and in their proper locations, so he turned and made for the wall.
Just as he reached it, he heard a woof from behind. Spi
That's when the dog leaped.
"You could have told me we was walking," scolded Selda as she trudged along behind a rug merchant's wagon, an hour after sunrise and their departure from Sanctuary.
"I didn't have enough coins to buy better at the time," Jake answered. "I'll see what I can do about arranging a ride when we break for the midday meal." "Harumph," she answered. After a minute, she said, "And I still don't know why you had to bring that
along." Her thumb stabbed behind them. Jake tugged on the laundry cord he had tied around the dog's neck after it had leaped toward him and
started licking his face. "Look, old woman," said Jake. "You want to go back and tell that beast he can't come with us?" She glanced back at the huge dog, its tongue lolling out of its mouth as its tail wagged. "Nice puppy," Jake crooned and the dog's tail wagged even faster. "What are we going to feed it? It's licking its chops and eyeing the horses!" "We'll buy some meat," said Jake. "We have means." "We do?" "Better than I thought, old woman. We'll find a proper fence in Ranke, who'll give us more than young
Bezul ever would, and we'll be set for life. Riverside house and a servant, m'gal." "A servant?" she said in wonder. "Like I told you, one to go and we're done." He gri
until he died of old age seven years later. Selda and Jake actually wept when they buried the beast in the
garden behind the riverside house. And they lived happily ever after, until a thief name Grauer broke into Jake's strong room and stole most of his wealth, and Jake had to steal it back—but that's another story.
Afterword. Ly
Who says you can't go home again? When home is the city named Sanctuary, anything is possible.
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that Boskon di
Oops.
I guess I'd started thinking about it a year or so earlier, when I realized I was signing (and resigning) battered copies of Thieves' World and Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn that were older than the readers handing them to me. Maybe a reprint program, I'd thought, but no publisher was interested in reprints only. Frankly, they weren't interested in resurrecting anything that seemed as tightly associated with the 1980s as, oh, Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan.
Enter Brian Thomsen, editor extraordinaire and proverbial longtime friend of the family, and Tom Doherty, who'd been the man-in-charge at ACE Books when Thieves' World began its run and is now the man-in-charge at TOR. Brian was looking for a project he could sink his fangs into and Tom, in a moment of weakness, agreed that if anyone was going to bring back Thieves' World it should be TOR—but not as a reprint program.
They wanted new material—new anthologies that got back to Sanctuary's grungy roots and a novel (a "James Michener-esque epic novel"—it said so right at the top of the contract) that would recap all twelve previously published anthologies while leveling the playing field for the new stories. I, of course, would write the "Michener-esque epic novel" that we honestly thought Tor would be publishing in the first half of 2001.
Oops.
Thieves' World has always been a lot like an iceberg: What's visible on the surface is only a fraction of what's really there. Contracts had to be written and rewritten. The authors who wrote for the original incarnation had to sign off on the parameters of the new one. New authors had to be selected, invited… persuaded that their professional lives would not be complete until they'd written a story set in the renovated Sanctuary. And there was that little matter of turning more than fifty often contradictory (often deliberately contradictory) stories into that "Michener-esque epic novel."
Little by little, Thieves' World came together. All the first-generation authors signed off on the changes necessary to bring Sanctuary into the twenty-first century world of electronic publishing and multi-media exploitation rights; many of them signed up to write new stories. I read and re-read the old stories, stared at maps, dove into obscure histories until the boundaries blurred and I began to think I knew what had happened in Sanctuary, what was happening, and what needed to happen in the future.
The novel was late… very late. By the time the authors in Turning Points got a chance to read it, their stories were also—technically—very late. I owe them, and everyone else co
Welcome back—I hope you'll agree it was worth the wait.