Thieves' World

Down at the wrong end of the Maze, where the Rankan Empire's writ runs thin and a cut purse is the least of what can happen to you, sits the town men call Sanctuary — with a straight face, because irony is the cheapest thing on offer here. Thieves' World is that town: a rotting frontier port of cutthroats, exiled gods, sell-swords and gutter-mages, raised by many hands to be shared. Robert Lynn Asprin threw the gates open in 1979 with a notion as much as a book — hand a dozen writers one map, one tavern (the Vulgar Unicorn), and each other's characters, then let the tales collide. What grew from it is a run of mosaic anthologies threaded by recurring hands: Poul Anderson, C. J. Cherryh, Andrew Offutt, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Janet Morris, and co-editor Lynn Abbey, who later reopened the city for a fresh cycle. Out of that common ground rose sagas that stand alone — Offutt's thief Hanse Shadowspawn, and above all Janet Morris's iron mercenary Tempus and his Sacred Band of Stepsons, whose Beyond Sanctuary campaigns and Sacred Band tales make up the largest sub-cycle the catalog holds. It sprawls, as any city does; not every alley connects, and the reading is no single straight line. What marks Sanctuary out is the grain of a lived-in underworld — no chosen ones, only people working an angle, where a god's favor is a liability and today's ally palms tomorrow's knife. Begin at the beginning: the first anthology, Thieves' World, then follow the mosaics in publication order as they turn steadily more serialized. Readers taken with Tempus can run Morris's Sacred Band thread on its own from Beyond Sanctuary onward.