inhaling whatever dust it was that glowed like fire and burned like hot needles
when it landed on the stallion’s dappled hide.
The hellish dust was the least of Tempus’s troubles on this morning that had
lost its light, as if the sun had slunk away to hide from the battle under way
beneath the sky. Oh, the sun had risen, brazen and bold, illuminating the
flaming pillar raging up to heaven and the storm clouds with their lightning
ranged round it. But it had been eaten by the stormclouds and the soot of the
fire and the lightning spewing up from the grounds around the uptown Peres house
and down from the furious heavens of the gods, who smote at witches’ work and
cheeky demons with equal force.
And it was this absence of the morning, this vanquishing of natural light, that
bothered Tempus (accustomed to analyzing omens and all too familiar with
godsign) as he rode down to greet Theron, the man he’d helped bring to Ranke’s
teetering throne, and Brachis, High Priest of Vashanka, while around the town
civil war and infamy reigned, unabated.
If the chaos around him (which he’d once been sent here to banish) weren’t
enough of an indictment of his performance, then the skittishness of the Tr6s
horse made it certain: he was failing ignominiously to bring order-even for a
day-to Sanctuary.
And though some men would not have taken the responsibility and clasped the
fault for all Sanctuary’s catalogue of evils to his bosom, Tempus would and
almost gladly did-the state of town and loved ones fulfilled his own dire