Gayle was nodding intently, trying to memorize all of that, as Crit left.
His gray horse was still where Crit had tethered it, Enlil be praised. If that one disappeared, then it was going to become police business, and fast. But it hadn’t. He rubbed its nose and it whickered softly as he mounted up and headed off into the early morning sunlight.
The worst thing about this new duty was getting used to sleeping at night, working in the daytime. For Crit’s money, sunlight was something you left to the cattle. In Sanctuary, like most other venues he’d worked, what was worth doing got done at night.
But command made its demands, and when he got to the Storm God’s temple he wished he’d commanded his mage, Randal, to come to the Street of Temples with him.
The horse that was tied in front of the temple screamed money and power from every trapping and the pantherskin shabraque it wore was of a style and quality Crit had never seen before.
“Where’s the owner of this horse?” he demanded of the temple acolyte who’d obviously been paid to watch over it and was doing that from a distance: the shabraque wasn’t the only part of this beast with teeth.
“In back, Commander, down that alley.” The acolyte rolled its eunuch’s eyes heavenward as if to say. Don’t ask me why these warriors do what they do.
Crit looked at the tethered warhorse, whose saddle had hung on it both a large and small shield, and other implements of close and regimented fighting, and blew out a long, slow breath.
Crit’s dues to the mercenary’s guild were still paid up. He rode, rather than walked, down the alley on the southwest side of the Storm God’s temple until he came to a man eating a skewer of lamb and drinking from a wineskin, leaning up against the temple wall near a pile of stones.