read the writing on the wall?”
“No, my lady,” he said before he looked above her head and beyond, to where
graffiti scribed in blood defaced the mud-brick. “Tell me no tales of power: If
doom could be avoided, you’d have a live child in your arms.”
And he reined the Tros around, setting off again toward Wideway and the
dockside, forcing his thoughts to collect and focus on the audience with Theron
soon to come, and away from the writing on the wall behind the woman: “The
plague is in our souls, not in our destiny. Ilsig rules. Kill the witches and me
priests or perish!”
It sounded like a good idea to him, but he couldn’t throw in his lot with the
rebels: he’d made a truce with magic for the sake of his soldiers; he’d made a
truce with gods for the sake of his soul.
And perishing wasn’t an option for Tempus. Sometimes he wondered if he might
manage it by getting himself eaten by fishes or chopped into tiny pieces, but
the chances were good that his parts would reassemble or-worse-that each morsel
of him would reconstitute an entire being.
It was bad enough existing in one discrete form; he couldn’t bear to be
replicated countless times. So he smothered the rebellious impulse to throw in
his lot with the rebels and see if it was true that any army he joined could not
lose its battles.
He was bound by oath to Theron, to the necromant Ischade in solemn pact, to
Stormbringer in another, and to Enlil, patron god of the armies now that
Vashanka was metamorphosing into something else within the body of Gyskouras,