armies of the night. The city of Ranke, once the brightest jewel of the Rankan
empire, shuddered in the dark, her ochre walls stained dusky from the storm’s
black and ugly might.
Thunder growled; winds yowled. Black hail pelted Theron’s palace, shattering
windows and pounding doors. On temple streets and cultured byways it bounced,
sharp as diamonds and large as heads, bringing impious priests to their knees
and cheap nobles to charity in slick streets covered with greasy slush freezing
to ice as black, some said, as their emperor Theron’s heart.
For all knew that Theron had come to power in a coup instigated by the armies-he
was a creature of blood, a wild beast of the battlefield. And the proof of this
was in the allies who had brought him to the Imperial palace: Nisibisi witches,
demons of the black beyond, devils of horrid aspect, even the feared near
immortals of the blood cults-Askelon, the lord of dreams, and his brother-in-law
Tempus, demigod and favorite son of Vashanka, the Rankan wargod, to name but
two- had lent their strength to Theron’s cause.
Did not Tempus still labor at his gory task of purging the disloyal-all who had
been influential in Abakithis’s court? Did not women still wake to empty beds
and find pouches made of human skin and filled with thirty gold soldats (the
Rankan price for one human life) nailed to their boudoir doors?
Did not those few remaining adherents of Abakithis, former emperor of Ranke (now
deceased, unavenged, much cursed in his uneasy grave), still scuttle even