He got his eyes open again. It took all the strength he had. He saw her face in a way he had never seen it, looked her in the eyes and looked into hell, and wanted now to shut them, but he had lost that volition.
"I've told you what to do," she said. "Go. Leave, while you can. Get out of here!"
High on the hill a horn blew, brazen and pealing alarm. The alarm outside the Unicorn was more mundane and less elegant: a series of old pots battered with all the strength in a watcher's arm. Help, ha! Invasion, incursion, mayhem! There was fire in Downwind. And uptown. In a dozen intersections barricades started going up, torches flared, horses' hooves clattered wildly through the night.
"Get 'em," Lysias the Black instructed his small band, and arrows rained down on one of Jubal's bands that planned to barricade the Blue line. "Rouse our wizard help up here, move it! That road stays open!"
From his vantage on a rooftop, bright fire sprang up on the hill.
More horns and clatterings and brayings of alarms in the night. Militias hit the streets.
And a rider on a bay horse pelted down the riverside with reckless abandon right through the Blue, headed for Black lines and comrades.
All hell was loose in the streets. Shutters broke (thieves in Sanctuary were no laggards, and had had their eyes set on this and that target from long before: when the riot broke, they smashed and grabbed and ran like all the devils and the Rankan pantheon was at their heels.)
Uptown, one of the horns braying and one of the alarms ringing was the mere barracks and the Guard; but Wale-grin, who had not been slow to pick up the rumors, already had his snipers posted, and the first surge of looters uptown met a flight of arrows and a series of professionally organized barricades. This was standard operation. It deterred the more dilatory of invaders.
It did not deter all of them.
Down on riverside, Ischade sat wrapped only in her black robe, in the tumbled fiery silks of her bed, and grinned while her eyes rolled back in her head.
Shadows poured down the riverside, shadows marched from the ravaged barracks in Downwind, and ignored the barriers the Beggar-king and his kind had erected. Ignored the PFLS and its flung stones and its naphtha-bottles and the fires: that demi-legion had seen the fires of hell and were not impressed. They had already passed the Yellow line, and they swaggered along Red territory, the winding streets of Downwind, with a swiftness no ordinary band could achieve, faster and faster.
"They're coming," Stilcho said to Haught, and the Nisi magus hardly liked the satisfaction in Stilcho's face. Haught snatched the skin of blood and shook out a few more drops to keep the Shambles-ghosts on the track- glanced a second time at Stilcho, thinking uncomfortably of treachery.
"Janni. Where's Janni? Have you located him?"
"Oh, I can guess where he'll go," Stilcho said.
"Roxane."
Stilcho laughed and grinned. He had a patched eye and was missing one tooth on the side, but in the dark when the scars showed less there was a ruined handsomeness about him. An elegance. He snatched the skin from Haught and hurled it, spattering the cobbles. "Run!" he yelled at Haught, and laughed aloud.
"Stilcho, damn you!"
"Try!" Stilcho yelled. Ghosts streamed and gibbered about them, swirled and whirled like bats, and Haught assessed the situation in an eyeblink and whipped his cloak about his arm and ran as if the fiends of hell were on his track.
Stilcho howled. Slapped his knees. "Run, you friggin' bastard! Run, Nisi, run!"
He would pay for it in the morning. Haught would see to that. But he had Her orders, direct.
He jogged off in the direction of the bridge, where a shadowy troop needed help passing running water. His old partner was in the lead and the company insignia was intact.
Behind him the ghosts did what everyone else in Sanctuary was busy doing: They chose sides and took cover and had at one another.
Stilcho turned his own troop up the riverside and through the streets-slower now, because they had a half-living man for a guide. But he would take them only so far. They would have no trouble with Walegrin's uptown barricades or the Stepsons' eastward; and they were not in a negotiating mood, having their murders recently in mind. Teach the uptowners their vulnerability -show the bastards who gave the orders that there were those who remembered their last orders and their last official mistakes-
He jogged along, panting, limping-Ischade's repair work was thorough, but a long run still sent pain jolting through him.
Ghosts passed them, headed where they wished to be. They were polyglot and headed for old haunts, former domiciles, old feuds. Sanctuary might get pragmatic about its haunts, but the ghosts grew bolder and nervier in these declining days of the Empire; and these were not the reasoning kind. These had been walking patrol in Ischade's service, or Roxane's; and a few luckless ones tried to go complain to Roxane about the matter.
Roxane cursed a blue streak (literally) and in a paroxysm of rage conjured a dozen snakes and a demon, an orange-haired, grayskinned being named Snapper Jo which ran rampaging up the riverside till it forgot quite what it was about and got to rampaging through a warehouse full of beer. It was not, all in all, one of Roxane's better nights: the attack was desultory, Ischade was definitely aiming at something else, and Roxane was willing to use the diversion while she took wing crosstown-
"Damn!" Haught yelled. His sight picked that up, a pale blue arc headed across Sanctuary with only one target in mind. He was earthbound. He ran for the river and Ischade with all his might, and came pelting past the wards to find Ischade sitting on the bed wrapped in orange silk and the skirts of her black cloak and laughing like a lunatic.
Uptown the Lady Nuphtantei's door went wide open and the elegant Lady Nuphtantei, Harka Bey and not easily affrighted, went pelting down the street naked as she was born, for the drunken demon that had materialized in her house breaking porcelains and crunching silver underfoot was not a thing the servants or her daughter had stayed to deal with, not for a moment.
She ran straight into a company of Walegrin's guard and kept going, so fast the guard hardly had time to turn and stare.
Then what was behind her showed up, and the troops scattered.
Arrows flew. A barricade was afire over by the Maze edge where Jubal's gangs tried to hold against rooftop archers, mage-illusions, and a handful of paired riders who had the style and manner of the old Stepsons. And the fire spread to buildings, which doubled the chaos. Men threw water and ducked arrows. A frantic family scurried out with possessions and arrows pelted indiscriminate.
The physician Harran wrung his hands (one was a woman's) and paced his upstairs room and took another look out the window, in the little garrett where he had hidden his affliction-fortuitously hidden, considering what had befallen everyone else in the barracks. But he had no practice now, no home, no direction. Mriga gone. There was the little dog, which paced about after him panting and whuffing in mimic concern.
He was (whatever his affliction) still a doctor. The pain he spied on worried at him and gnawed his gut. "Oh, damn," he muttered to himself, when a boy darted from cover, limned red in the firelight, and flung a torch. Tried to fling it. An arrow took him. The boy fell, writhing, skewered through the leg, right near the great artery. "Damn."
Herran slammed the shutter, shut his eyes and suddenly turned and ran down the stairs, thundering down the hollow boards, into the smell of smoke and the glare outside. He heard shouting, wiped his eyes. Heard the boy screaming above the roar of the burning barricade, above the shouts of men in combat. Horses screamed. He heard the thunder of hooves and dashed out to reach the boy as the riders streaked past. "Lie still," he yelled at the screaming, thrashing youth. "Shut up!" He grabbed him about the arm and hauled it over his shoulders, heard a frantic barking and another great shout as he stumbled to his feet, the oncoming thunder of riders on the return, a solid wall of horsemen.