There was fire in Downwind. And uptown. In a dozen intersections barricades
started going up, torches flared, horses’ hooves clattered wildly through the
night.
“Get ’em,” Lysias the Black instructed his small band, and arrows rained down on
one of Jubal’s bands that planned to barricade the Blue line. “Rouse our wizard
help up here, move it! That road stays open!”
From his vantage on a rooftop, bright fire sprang up on the hill.
More horns and clatterings and brayings of alarms in the night. Militias hit the
streets.
And a rider on a bay horse pelted down the riverside with reckless abandon right
through the Blue, headed for Black lines and comrades.
All hell was loose in the streets. Shutters broke (thieves in Sanctuary were no
laggards, and had had their eyes set on this and that target from long before:
when the riot broke, they smashed and grabbed and ran like all the devils and
the Rankan pantheon was at their heels.)
Uptown, one of the horns braying and one of the alarms ringing was the mere
barracks and the Guard; but Wale-grin, who had not been slow to pick up the
rumors, already had his snipers posted, and the first surge of looters uptown
met a flight of arrows and a series of professionally organized barricades. This
was standard operation. It deterred the more dilatory of invaders.
It did not deter all of them.
Down on riverside, Ischade sat wrapped only in her black robe, in the tumbled
fiery silks of her bed, and grinned while her eyes rolled back in her head.
Shadows poured down the riverside, shadows marched from the ravaged barracks in