of their hire to prospective employers. Fine corselets, cuirasses ancient and
modern, custom’s best axes and swords, and helmetry with crests dyed to order
could be had in Sanctuary that summer; but the downwind breeze had never smelled
fouler than after wending through their press.
Here and there among the steaming firepots siegecrafters and commanders of
fortifications drilled their engineers, lest from idleness picked men be
suborned by rival leaders seeking to upgrade their corps. To keep order here,
the Emperor’s haifbrother Kadakithis had only a handful of Rankan Hell Hounds in
his personal guard, and a local garrison staffed by indigenous Ilsigs, conquered
but not assimilated. The Rankans called the Ilsigs ‘Wrigglies’, and the
Wrigglies called the Rankans naked barbarians and their women worse, and not
even the rain could cool the fires of that age-old rivalry.
On the landspit north of the lighthouse, rain had stopped work on Prince
Kadakithis’s new palace. Only a man and horse, both bronze, both of heroic
proportions, rode the beach. Doom criers of Sanctuary, who once had proclaimed
their town ‘just left of heaven’, had changed their tune: they had dubbed
Sanctuary Death’s Gate and the one man, called Tempus, Death Himself.
He was not. He was a mercenary, envoy of a Rankan faction desirous of making a
change in emperors; he was a Hell Hound, by Kadakithis’s good offices; and
marshal of palace security, because the prince, not meant to triumph in his
governorship exile, was understaffed. Of late Tempus had become a royal