It was in the summer of 2016 that Kevin had the idea for us to do something in the Thieves’ World universe. He had just plowed through the entire series and was bitten by the muse. I had read one of the books back in the early 80s so I knew what it was but remembered next to nothing of it. So I borrowed his first two books and read through them.

The first task was to figure out where in the existing timeline the story takes place. I knew it would take me a while to read all of them so I settled for somewhere in Book 2. And then we wrote.

The premise we chose was to contribute to the TW universe with our own characters and situations while following the rules set out by Robert Asprin, et al (which he explains in the author’s notes of the first book). My first idea I teased out to an unsatisfactory conclusion, but I kept the notes and now it might make a second story. My first piece, shared here, I cannot honestly remember where it came from, but it’s an interesting character, though once revealed, he suffers from the tropes and problem of writing any character of his ilk, so he is probably a one-off. We shall see. The character I thought of in the first idea makes an appearance in the final act of this story.