He heard shouts over the Tros's hoofbeats as it lifted into a lope and trumpeted its war cry as it sped gladly toward the fray.
"Give her up, the slut-it's all her doing!" cried one hoarse voice from the mob.
"That's right!" a shrill woman's voice seconded the rebel demand: "S'danzo slut! She bore the accursed Stormchild's playmate! S'danzo wickedness has taken away the sun and turned the gods' ire upon us!"
And a third voice, streetwise and dark, a man's voice Tempus thought he ought to recognize, put in: "Come on, Walegrin, give her up and you go free-you and yours. We're only killing witches and their children today!"
"Screw yourself. Zip," one of the Rankans called back. "You'll have to take her from us. And we'll have a couple lives in exchange-yours for certain. That's a promise."
Tempus had only an instant to realize that Walegrin, the garrison commander, was one of the Rankans under siege, and to add up all he'd heard and realize that the blond soldier's sister-of-recoro, Illyra, must be the woman whose life was the subject of a traditional Sanctuary streetcorner debate.
Then the Tr6s was sighted by the rebels at the rear of the crowd, which began to part but not disperse.
Missiles pelted him, some barbed, some jagged, some meant for rolling bread or holding wine-and some designed for war.
He ducked an arrow hurtling toward him from a crossbow, his senses so much faster that he could see the helically-fletched blue feathers on its tail as it sped toward his heart.
The Tros was hit between the eyes with a tomato: it had seen the missile coming, but never flinched or ducked, its ears pricked like a sighting mechanism aligned upon the crowd: it was a warhorse, after all.
But Tempus found this affront unacceptable, and took exception to the brashness of the crowd. Reaching up with his left hand while still holding his reins, he plucked the arrow from the air when it was inches from his heart and, as he seldom did, flaunted his supernatural attributes before the crowd, holding the arrow high and breaking it between his fingers like a piece of straw as he bellowed in his most commanding voice: "Zip and all you rebels, disperse or face my personal wrath- a retribution that will haunt you till you die, and then some: you'll leave my fury to your descendants as a bequest."
And Zip's voice called back from a gloom in which all white faces looked alike and darker Wriggly skins faded to invisibility: "Come get me, Riddler. Your daughter did!"
He set about just that, but not before the crowd surged inward as one body, pinning the four Rankans and the girl they thought to shield against the wall.
He kneed the Tros in among confusion, took blows, and swung back and down with his sharkskin-hiked sword, inured to the death he dealt, his conscience salved before the fact by giving warning, so that his blood-lust now reigned unimpeded and rebels fell, like wheat before a scythe, under his blade, a sword the god of war had sanctified in countless bodies just like these, across more battlefields than Tempus cared to count.
But when, finally, the crowd broke to run and none clawed at his saddle or bit at his ankle or tried to blind the Tros horse with their sharpened sticks or hamstring it with their bread knives, he realized he'd been too late to save the day.
Oh, Walegrin, bloody and with a face pummeled beyond recognition so that Tempus could only recognize him by his braided blond locks and the tears streaming from his blackened sockets unheeded, would live to fight another day: he'd been innermost, protecting Illyra-the S'danzo seeress who should have forseen all this-with his own big body. But of the other three soldiers, one's gullet was split the way a fisherman cleans his catch, one's neck was hanging by a thread, and the third was hacked apart, limb from limb, his trunk still twitching weakly.
It was not the soldiers, however, who drew Tempus's attention, but the woman they'd tried to shield, who in turn had been protecting her child. Illyra, S'danzo skirts heavy with blood, cradled a young girl's body in her arms, and wept so silently that it was Walegrin's grief, not her own, that let Tempus know that the child was surely dead.
"Lillis," Walegrin sobbed, manliness forgotten because an innocent, his kin, was slain; "Lillis, dear gods, no... she's alive, 'Lyra, alive, I tell you."
But all the desperate wishes in the world would not make it so, and the S'danzo woman, whose eyes were wise and whose face was tired beyond her years and whose own belly bled profusely where the axe that had hewn her daughter had gone through child and into mother, met Tempus's eyes before she turned to the field commander who could no longer command so much as his grief.
"Tempus, isn't it? And your marvelous horse?" Illyra's voice had the sough of the seawind in it and her eyes were bleak and full of the witch-dust settling all about. "Shall I foretell your future, lord of blood, or would you rather not read the writing on the wall?"
"No, my lady," he said before he looked above her head and beyond, to where graffiti scribed in blood defaced the mud-brick. "Tell me no tales of power: If doom could be avoided, you'd have a live child in your arms."
And he reined the Tros around, setting off again toward Wideway and the dockside, forcing his thoughts to collect and focus on the audience with Theron soon to come, and away from the writing on the wall behind the woman: "The plague is in our souls, not in our destiny. Ilsig rules. Kill the witches and me priests or perish!"
It sounded like a good idea to him, but he couldn't throw in his lot with the rebels: he'd made a truce with magic for the sake of his soldiers; he'd made a truce with gods for the sake of his soul.
And perishing wasn't an option for Tempus. Sometimes he wondered if he might manage it by getting himself eaten by fishes or chopped into tiny pieces, but the chances were good that his parts would reassemble or-worse-that each morsel of him would reconstitute an entire being.
It was bad enough existing in one discrete form; he couldn't bear to be replicated countless times. So he smothered the rebellious impulse to throw in his lot with the rebels and see if it was true that any army he joined could not lose its battles.
He was bound by oath to Theron, to the necromant Ischade in solemn pact, to Stormbringer in another, and to Enlil, patron god of the armies now that Vashanka was metamorphosing into something else within the body of Gyskouras, their common son. And he'd spent an interval with the Mother Goddess of the fishfaces in which he'd learned that Mother Bey had lusts as great as any northern deity.
So he alone, acquainted with so many of the players intimately and capable of standing up to more-than-human actors, was competent to negotiate a settlement among the heavens through supernal avatars and earthly rulers, the representatives of their respective gods.
This task was complicated, not helped, by Kadakithis's impending marriage to the Beysib ruler, as it was obstructed, not advanced, by Theron's arrival here and now, when all was far from well and men had brought their hells to life by meddling with powers they did not understand.
So he didn't care, he decided, what happened here, beyond his personal goals: to protect the souls of his Stepsons and those who loved him, to reward constancy where it had been demonstrated (even by mages and necromants), to clear his conscience so far as possible before he trekked back north, where the horses still grazed in Hidden Valley and the Successors on Wizardwall would welcome him back to what had become the closest thing to home he could remember.
But to do that, he must see Niko on the mend and on his way back to Bandara; he must do what Abarsis had counseled, and more.