through the deadly, knife-sharp hail with bulging pockets to the mercenaries’
guildhall to leave their fortunes at the desk with scrawled notes saying, “For
Tempus, to distribute as he wills, from the admiring and loyal family of So-and
So,” while servants spirited noble wives and children out back ways and slumyard
gates in beggars’ guise?
Thus it was whispered, as the storm raged unabated into its second day, that
Theron and his creature Tempus were to blame for this black blizzard straight
from hell.
It was whispered by a woman to Critias, Tempus’s first officer and finest covert
actor, who had infiltrated the noble strata of the imperial city; And Crit, with
a wry twitch of lips that drew down his patrician nose and a rake of his
swordhand through dark, feathery hair, replied to the governor’s wife he was
bedding: “No one gives a contract for a sunrise, m’lady. No man. that is.
Theron is no more than that. When gods throw tantrums, even Tempus listens.”
Crit had fought in the Wizard Wars up north and the woman knew it. His guise was
that of a disaffected officer who had renounced his commission after Abakithis’s
assassination at the Festival of Man and now, like so many others of the old
guard, scrambled from allegiance to allegiance in search of safety.
So the governor’s wife just ran a finger along his jaw and smiled
commiseratingly as she said, “You men of the armies … all alike. I suppose
you’re telling me that this is good? This storm, this hail black as hell? That
it’s a sign we poor women cannot read?”