Despite the darkened ways and chancy footing, Crit let the young horse run,trusting pedestrians, should there be any, to scatter, and armed patrols torecognize him for who and what he was. The horse had a right to comfort, whereit could find some. Crit couldn't think of a thing that would do the same forhim, now that the gods had dropped one shoe and all he could do was wait untilTempus dropped the other.
The storm didn't exactly break, but on the fourth day it mellowed.
By then, Theron and Tempus had summoned Brachis, High Priest of the VariouslyNamed Wargods of Imperial Ranke, and concocted a likely story for the populace.
Executions, held in abeyance for the first three days of the storm, wereresumed. "More purges, obviously. Your Majesty," Brachis had suggested, unctuousto the point of insult, managing by his exaggerated servility to mean theopposite of what he said, "will appease the hungry gods."
And Theron, old and as gray as the shadows in this newly acquired but not yetconquered palace full of politicians and whores, gave Brachis a tare fully asblack as the raging sky outside and said, "Right, priest. Let's have a dozen ofyour worst enemies bled out in Blood Square by lunch."
Tempus stayed an impulse to touch his old friend Theron's knee under the table.
But Brachis didn't rise to Theron's bait. The priest bowed his way out in aswish of copper-beaded robes.
"God's balls, Riddler," said the aging general to the ageless one, "do you thinkwe've angered the gods? More to the point, do you think we've got one to anger?"
Theron's jaw jutted so that the pitting of age made it look like a walnut shell,or the snout of the moth-eaten geriatric lion he so much resembled from his