“Your orders, chief? She’s probably meat by now anyway.”
“She’ll be alive-hiding somewhere near where we caught her that night.”
“An’ if she’s not?”
“Then I’m wrong and she did start it. My orders, Thrush: Find her before someone
else does.”
Walegrin endured Thrush’s disappointed sigh and watched as the little man left
the same way he’d come; then he went up to the street.
Plague sign: the palace wanted plague sign to keep the visitors on the straight
and narrow. It might work. It might keep the Imperials tight on their ship, away
from the madness that was Sanctuary. But it would sure as hell bring panic to
what was left of the law-abiding community and, the way things were going, it
would probably bring plague as well.
He wrenched a burning brand out of a neighboring building and, after sending the
lookout down to the cellar, headed off to the wharves. It wasn’t two hours since
the afternoon sky had been split by a dark apparition streaking between the
Peres house and the palace. Damn witches. Damn magic. Damn every last one of
them who made honest men die while they played games with gods.
* * *
Understanding came slowly to Stilcho, which was not at all surprising. There was
no peace in Ischade’s one-time house for understanding and a man, once he
understood himself to be dead, did not reconsider <he issue. Indeed, his first
reaction on seeing Straton there with an arrow by his heart was considerably
less than charitable. This bleeding hulk who had supplanted him in Her
affections; this murder-dealing Stepson who had massacred his comrades was