The rain bounced fetlock high on cobbles and ran down the Riddler’s oilskin mantle to his sharkskin-hiked sword, where it formed rivulets like spilled blood and just as red from the dye it washed.
The specter of the man and horse (both too large and too well muscled for
Sanctuary’s own, both streaming water red as blood and splashing it behind, as the man called the Riddler loped his horse, oblivious to the torrent and the spray the horse’s hooves kicked up, down the center of Red Clay Street) was one to stop a superstitious heart and make a criminal seek cover.
Yet at the comer of West Gate Street, where the sudden downpour swept seaward to the wharves down the slope so deep and fast that rats and cats and pieces of less recognizable flesh were carried along in its currents as if the White Foal
River had changed its course, three men stepped out from cover, barring his path, knee deep in water, crossbows drawn and blades unsheathed.
A crossbow, in this wind so fierce it blotted out the Tros’s snorts of warning, and in a rain so dense no cat-gut or woman’s-hair bowstring could be dry, would shoot awry.
Tempus knew it, and so did the three who stood there, daring him to ride them down.
He considered it, though he’d sought a confrontation, annoyed by the boys with sweatbands around their foreheads and weapons better than street toughs ought to have.
The Tros, having more sense and being a larger target, stopped still and craned its neck, imploring him with liquid eyes to remember why he’d come here, not just take an opportunity luck offered and waste it to vent some spleen and make his presence known.