Thieves World 7 – The Dead of Winter by Asprin, Robert

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