one would have known about them. Bodies in those streets were nothing new;
neither Stepsons nor Rankan soldiers bothered counting them; near the
slaughterhouses cheap crematoriums flourished; for those too poor even for that,
there was the White Foal, taking ambiguous dross to the sea without complaint.
But the squads ventured uptown, to the east side and the centre of Sanctuary
itself where the palace hierophants and the merchants lived and looked away from
downtown, scented pomanders to their noses.
The Unicorn crowd no longer turned quiet when Niko and Janni entered; their
scruffy faces and shabby gear and bleary eyes proclaimed them no threat to the
mendicants or the whores. Competition, they were now considered, and it had been
hard to float the legend, harder to live it. Or to live it down, since none of
the Stepsons but their task force leader, Crit (who himself had never moved
among the barracks ranks, proud and shining with oil and fine weapons and finer
ideals) knew that they had not quit but only worked shrouded in subterfuge on
Tempus’s orders to flush the Nisibisi witch.
But the emergence of the death squads had raised the pitch, the ante, given the
matter a new urgency. Some said it was because Shadowspawn, the thief, was
right: the god Vashanka had died and the Rankans would suffer their due. Their
due or not, traders, politicians, and moneylenders – the ‘oppressors’ – were
nightly dragged out into the streets, whole families slaughtered or burned alive
in their houses, or hacked to pieces in their festooned wagons.