sweet sleep came.
VASHANKA’S MINION
by Jante Morris
1
The storm swept down on Sanctuary in unnatural fury, as if to punish the thieves
for their misdeeds. Its hailstones were large as fists. They pummelled Wideway
and broke windows on the Street of Red Lanterns and collapsed the temple of Ils,
most powerful of the conquered Ilsigs’ gods.
The lightning it brought snapped up from the hills and down from the devilish
skies and wherever it spat the world shuddered and rolled. It licked round the
dome of Prince Kadakithis’s palace and when it was gone, the Storm God
Vashanka’s name was seared into the stone in huge hieratic letters visible from
the harbour. It slithered in the window of Jubal’s walled estate and circled
round the slavetrader’s chair while he sat in it, turning his black face blue
with terror.
It danced on a high hill between the slaver’s estate and the cowering town,
where a mercenary named Tempus schooled his new Syrese horse in the art of
death. He had bought the tarnished silver beast sight unseen, sending to a man
whose father’s life he had once saved.
‘Easy,’ he advised the horse, who slipped in a sharp turn, throwing mud up into
his rider’s face. Tempus cursed the mud and the rain and the hours he would need
to spend on his tack when the lesson was done. As for the screaming, stumbling
hawk-masked man who fled iron-shod hooves in ever-shortening circles, he had no
gods to invoke – he just howled.
The horse wheeled and hopped; its rider clung tightly, reins flapping loose,
using only his knees to guide his mount. If the slaver who kept a private army