But if plague did break out, their walls, atriums, and shaded verandas wouldn’t protect them. So they told him, the garrison commander, to keep the guards out and alert. His men grumbled, preferring to slouch over a desultory dice game in the barracks, but he welcomed a chance to get away from the walls that trapped the heat of summer as surely as they did the frigid dampness of winter.
Sanctuary itself was quiet. No one was moving an unnecessary muscle. The Street of Red Lanterns, which he had patrolled, had been almost deserted. Few men would pay to touch sweat-slicked flesh on a night like this.
It was ironic, in a way, that after a year or more of wizard-witched weather, the Street talk was about the failure of magic. Most of the brothels-the big houses like the Aphrodisia, anyway-usually bought cool night breezes from the journeymen up at the Mageguild, but this summer (a summer that was really no worse than any other) the big magic-banded doors stayed shut and the Hazard mages, when they were seen at all, were sweating through their robes like any common laborer.
Rumor said the worst was over and the magic was coming back, though only to the strongest, or the cursed, and as yet too unpredictable to sell at any price.
Rumor said a lot of things, but Walegrin, who did Molin Torchholder’s direct bidding, got the truth of them sometimes. Stormbringer’s pillar, which had purged Sanctuary of its dead and deadly, had sucked away the ether that made magic work. It would be a dog’s year before Sanctuary’s Mageguild sold anything but charlatan spells or prestidigitation regardless of the hazardous ranking of its residents.