"So you want me to be your Mama?" she asked grimly.
"Mama give boy fresh meat!" The fiend simpered, and Gilla swallowed sickly. She had seen Snapper Jo's table habits. They were not aesthetic. Once blood flowed he became a mindless eating machine.
Mindless.... Somewhere in the depths of her own mind Gilla felt something stir. She looked at Snapper Jo speculatively, and slowly began to sweep once more.
The White Foal River stirred like an awakening animal, expanding through the trees on either side of the upper ford until its shining tendrils crept across the General's Road toward the Street of Red Lanterns. The alleys Downwind were already underwater, and the Swamp of Night Secrets had become a pond.
Water gurgled over the marshy ground above Fisherman's Row and tugged like some marine thief at the small boats tied up on shore. Waterfront merchants labored mightily to protect their wares or fought over the carts that could take them to higher ground. In Caravan Square water stood in muddy pools. But the river roared its frustration where the high banks narrowed it, and nibbled angrily at the supports of the bridge.
Things were not much better elsewhere in the town. Water pounded on tiles and shingles, and roofs which had been at best inadequate turned into sieves. It seeped downward and mud walls began to sag. It pooled in streets and overflowed gutters, floating away the accumulated filth of years. Block after block, the water scoured, hurrying its captured debris toward the gaping mouths of the sewers, whose hollow roar soon became a constant undertone to the drumming of the rain.
Drowned rats and bigger things were swept onward- bodies thought long buried, pieces of rotting wood, wagon wheels, cracked dishes, a mercenary's scabbard, a beggar's precious heap of rags, all became part of the stream. And presently, where pallid waterweed had rooted in the underground channels or where bricks of ancient facings had fallen in, things stuck, each piece catching and trapping more until even the force of the water could not move it forward and it recoiled back into Sanctuary.
Rising waters from the sewer that ran beneath the Maze backed up and overflowed into one of the tunnels leading from the Palace grounds. At the same time, rising river water found an outlet in the escape tunnel that ended near the ford. These waters, meeting, clashed and rose. Some of the overflow splashed into the catacombs beneath the Street of Red Lanterns, but not all, and so, as the day wore on, water began to trickle slowly and inexorably up the tunnel whose entrance was in the basement of the Palace itself.
Water seeped into the dungeons unnoticed except by those few unfortunates who were still imprisoned there. But when it made its way into the portions of the lower Palace that had been remodeled into a nursery for the Child of the Temple, Gyskouras, and Arton and their companions, it was another matter. A storm impelled by alien magics and a flood in their own chambers was not only a threat but an insult as well.
Gyskouras screamed. Arton, face darkening as his own daemon sprang to life within him, screamed louder. The other children who enjoyed the dubious honor of being their companions wept or cowered. Alfi lost completely the edge of superiority that two years' seniority should have given him and clung like a leech to Vanda, while Latilla covered her face with her hands and closed up her fingers each time the noise level rose again.
Seylalha shouted desperate orders as Vanda and the nursemaids scuttled frantically to move children and bedding up to the playroom by the roof garden while above the Palace the sky rumbled echoes of the storm-children's rage. Gyskouras picked up the vase that had been the gift of a royal ambassador and threw it; Arton grabbed a wooden horse and flung it back at him. Lightnings clashed outside and sizzled down the sides of buildings fortunately too watersoaked to burn.
Conflicting winds made a chaos of the orderly banks of cloud, shook the Beysib ships at anchor, plucked off roof tiles and uprooted trees, and folk who had watched the rise of the waters with a nagging dread now trembled with active fear.
And Roxane, sensing the chaos in the heavens, laughed, for this was more than she had hoped for. She changed her strategy, using her control of the elementals to hold back the waters, forcing them to spread sideways into the town.
Gilla could feel the force of the winds even through the witch's wards. Roxane was still secluded, but though her minions knew no particulars, they reflected her emotions, and the growing atmosphere of malicious glee terrified Gilla. What was happening in Sanctuary?
She bent over a crate into which she had dumped half a dinner service-worth of broken crockery which she had found behind the bags of mouldering roots in the pantry and shoved it across the room. What this house needed was not a broom, but a shovel! Still bent over, she glanced around her.
The two house snakes were curled contentedly in their baskets before the stove. Three thralled souls sat at the table, swaying reflexively. Snapper Jo stood between her and the kitchen door, sucking meditatively on an old bone.
He caught her glance and grinned. "Nice and clean! Mistress be pleased. Fat lady make house nice and clean and Mistress wash town!" Overcome with the wit of this observation, he began to laugh. "Wash all the children away, then Snapper Jo be fat lady's boy!"
Gilla clenched her hands in her apron to keep them from closing on the fiend's scrawny throat. At home, she would have thrown something-if she had been at home she would have been throwing things long ago! She felt fury boiling in her belly; she was a lidded kettle ready to explode. Shaking, she hefted the crate of shattered crockery and marched toward the door.
"Fat lady not go out-" Snapper Jo began.
"Great Mistress said to clean her house-I'm cleaning, you wart-upholstered cretin, so get out of my way!" Gilla said between set teeth.
The gray fiend frowned and moved an indecisive half-step, struggling to reconcile the contradictory ideas and unfamiliar vocabulary. Gilla shouldered him aside, shifted her weight, and kicked open the door. Watery light filtered through the shimmering underside of the protective bubble with which Roxane had warded her domain. Gilla took a deep breath of dank air, tensed, and heaved the crate outward with all the strength of her rage.
It arced up and outward, trailing a comet's tail of broken crockery, and burst through.
Gilla was already turning to send another load after it when she heard a sound like a tearing sheet and staggered beneath a gust of wind. Over her shoulder she glimpsed the last shards of the bubble whirling away on the storm.
The wind swept through the kitchen, upheaving the table so that Snapper Jo had to leap aside. Gilla picked up a trashbasket and flung it at one of the thralls, upended another over the serpents, saw the fiend recover and start toward her, and snatched up her broom. Another of the soul-thralls lurched forward. Her swing connected with its head and knocked it bleeding into Snapper Jo's arms.
Gilla steadied herself and cocked the broom for another swing, but the fiend's eyes were fixed on the trickle of red that crossed the thrall's skin. Bony fingers tightened and the body began to struggle. The Snapper's thin lips writhed back from his razor teeth.
"Fresh meat," he said thickly, and then, oblivious to the tumult around him, bent to feed.
Before anything else could come at her, Gilla kicked over the rest of the trashbaskets, launched herself through the door and slammed it behind her, and scrambled, panting, across a soggy wilderness of weeds. Before her loomed the rain-dark walls of the warehouses, and beyond them, the bridge, over the river, to home.