Turning up Shadow Street toward the Maze, he saw deserted checkpoints of some faction who claimed everything from Lizard’s Way to the Governor’s warehouses as its own.
And because that faction was said to be Zip’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Sanctuary (PFLS), as unpopular now as was Zip himself, Tempus reined the horse left on Red Clay Street to reconnoiter despite the gusts and darkening sky and thunderous promise of rain that made the Tros horse under him shiver and throw its muzzle skyward.
He’d never exchanged a civil word with Zip, whom some said had caused far too much of the springtime carnage- whom Crit said had attempted murder and tried to blame the affair on Tempus’s own daughter, Kama.
And since the target of the murderous attack had been Straton, Critias’s Sacred
Band partner, the pair had teams out night and day, even in the midst of the
Stepsons’ preparations to withdraw-teams seeking to even the score with Zip’s eyes and tongue: an old Band prescription for curing traitors.
Lighting flared, a sheet sky-wide that banished darkness even on Shadow Street, so that Tempus saw backlit figures skulking from garbage heap to doorway in his wake.
This was PFLS territory all right.
The rain that accompanied a peal of thunder so loud it made the Tros horse flatten its ears and lower its head cared nothing for whom it wet or whom it unmasked: Both Tempus and his horse were only desultorily disguised-the horse with berry juice and trail mud and its “rider with dyes no better.