The one thing that could be said of them for certain was that they weren'tStepsons or Sacred Banders or nonaligned mercenaries from the guild hostel. Butthere was no convincing the terrorized populace of that.
And Niko and Janni - under the guise of disaffected mercenaries who had quit theStepsons, been thrown out of the guild hostel for unspeakable acts, and werecurrently degenerating Sanctuary-style in the filthy streets of the town thoughtthat they were close to identifying the death squads' leader. Hopefully, thisevening or the next, they would be asked to join the murderers in their squalidsport. '
Not that murder was uncommon in Sanctuary, or squalor. The Maze, now that Nikoknew it like his horses' needs or Janni's limits, was not the town's true nadir,only the multi-tiered slum's upper echelon. Worse than the Maze was ShamblesCross, filled with the weak and the meek; worse than the Shambles was Downwind,where nothing moved in the light of day and at night hellish sounds rode thestench on the prevailing east wind across the White Foal. A tri-level hell,then, filled with murderers, sold souls and succubi, began here in the Maze.
If the death squads had confined themselves to Maze, Shambles, and Downwind, noone would have known about them. Bodies in those streets were nothing new;neither Stepsons nor Rankan soldiers bothered counting them; near theslaughterhouses cheap crematoriums flourished; for those too poor even for that,there was the White Foal, taking ambiguous dross to the sea without complaint.But the squads ventured uptown, to the east side and the centre of Sanctuaryitself where the palace hierophants and the merchants lived and looked away from