“The Seven of Ores is called Red Clay, the card of the potter, the craftsman,”
Illyra began as Lalo picked up his brush. Then Latilla began to whimper, and
Gilla forgot to listen to the S’danzo as she bent to comfort her child.
In the night the mobs began to drag the dead and their possessions into the streets to burn them, but the sight of scorching brocades or melting gilt was too much for many of the more lawless, so the devout took to firing houses without checking too closely to see whether anyone were left alive inside.
Both the Stepsons and the Third Commando had their hands full trying to keep the flames from spreading into the mercantile section of town, while
Walegrin and the garrison guarded the palace from shouting mobs who bayed for the deaths of Prince Kadakithis and the Beysib whore. By the time the sun rose like a red eye upon the horizon, the sky bore a pall reminiscent of wizard weather, but this evil came wholly from mortals, or perhaps from mortality.
When Lalo finally woke, it took a few disoriented moments for him to realize that his head was throbbing and his neck stiff not from fever, but from having slept slumped over his worktable, and that the gray light that filtered through the curtain was not the cool dimness of dawn, but a dreadful noon. With a groan he straightened, blinked, and looked around him.
On the worktable before him were the last of the S’danzo cards. Illyra lay still in her chair. For one shocked moment Lalo thought she was dead, and realized that the horror and hatred he had felt the night before had drained away, leaving only a hollow despair. Gilla sat by the couch like a monument, but at his movement her eyes opened, red-rimmed in her ravaged face.