with a sign for the palace police without even a second thought to the fine body
behind it which would soon be lifeless.
The sky was still black as a witch’s crotch and the wind was chorusing its
judgment song in a many-throated voice Crit had heard occasionally on the
battlefield when Tempus’s non-human allies took a hand in this skirmish or that
choraling the way it used to when wizard weather blew in Sanctuary, where Crit’s
partner and his brothers of the Sacred Band were now, down at the empire’s most
foul and egregious southernmost appurtenance.
By the time Crit had retrieved his horse, his fingers were playing with the luck
charms in his beltpouch. Normally, he’d have pulled them out, squatted down,
shaken and thrown them in the straw for guidance.
But the storm was guidance enough; he didn’t need to ask a question he wouldn’t
like the answer to. If his partner Strat had been on his right tonight, he’d
have bet his friend any odds that, when the weather broke, Tempus would come
rousting Crit without so much as an explanation and they’d be heading south to
Sanctuary where the Sacred Band was quartered for the winter.
Not that he didn’t want to see Strat-he did. Not that he wasn’t happy that the
Storm god Vashanka, God of the Annies, of Rape and Pillage, of Bloodlust and
Fury and Death’s Gate, was manifest-he was. What he’d told the Rankan bitch was
true-you couldn’t win a war without your god. But Vashanka, the Rankan Storm
God, had deserted the Stepsons, Crit’s unit, in their need. So the unit had