was thinking.
They both remembered, all too well, what entities of the supernatural the two of them had encountered in their time. Even if Olgun couldn't quite identify the magics he had sensed, if it was familiar to him at all, it was absolutely, positively nothing they ever wanted to face again.
Rain fell in fat, slow, cold drops, like snow or hail with second thoughts. It drummed on the leaves, drummed on the soil, drummed on Widdershins's sodden hood, until the day sounded as dull and gray as it looked.
“How about we trade?” she asked, tugging on that hood with one hand, the reins with the other. “You can wander around getting soaked, trying to figure out if you should be breathing the air or drinking it, and I'll ride around nice and dry in your head, for a change!”
And then, having gotten more or less the response she anticipated, “Oh, shut up.” She twisted to look back over her shoulder. “You! Tell Olgun to shut up.”
The horse sneezed on her. Olgun howled, laughing until he couldn't breathe—which wasn't really an issue, since he didn't breathe, but was still saying quite a bit.
“Perfect. Just wonderful.” Shins gave some thought to wiping the back of her tunic clean, but decided to just let the rain take care of it. “I hope you two will be very happy together.”
Olgun continued to snicker, the horse continued to shiver and snort, and Widdershins continued to grumble as the road rolled on beneath feet and hooves.
Until, finally, the curtain of weather drew back enough to display the last winding stretch of highway and the glistening, rain-drenched walls of Davillon. High above, a tiny fissure in the lowering clouds allowed a single ray of sunlight to shine through, reflecting from the watery sheen to cast the city in a faint golden glow.
Shins, Olgun, and even—so it seemed—the horse stared in sheer incredulity. “You have got to be kidding me,” the young woman said finally. “Olgun?”
All he could do was shrug those nonexistent shoulders. It wasn't him; it wasn't magic. Just a genuine, if dramatic—well, grossly melodramatic—coincidence of the elements.
“Guess you're not the only god who thinks he's got a sense of humor.” She sniffed once, almost haughtily, and resumed her trek—for about a dozen muddy, squelching steps. Then she halted again, squinting through the rain, raising a hand to protect her face from the moisture her hood failed to catch.
Was that…? It was so hard to see—at this distance, only the pool of light she'd just scoffed at made it possible at all—but it certainly looked as though…
“Is it me,” she asked softly, “or is the gate shut?”
The god's power surged, and the landscape seemed to flash by to either side. Her vision supernaturally sharpened, Widdershins could no longer harbor any doubt. The massive doorway into the greatest of Galice's southern cities was well and firmly closed.
Shins couldn't see the sun, of course; hadn't all day. Still and all, she knew her sense of the time couldn't be too far off. It was a few hours past noon, still early for the many merchants and shoppers who would stick around after the bulk of the markets had closed down, hoping to finagle special bargains for themselves. And that trade was fed, during all but the winter months, by a steady feed of goods from outside.
Never, in Shins's memory, had the gates been shut before dusk.
Nor was that the only abnormality she noticed, now that she could see. Sentries stood below, in and around the watch-house by the gate; and sentries stood above, patrolling atop the narrow wall. Just as always.
But their numbers were not just as always. Shins didn't bother doing a head count, but she figured there were at least twice as many soldiers on duty as she'd have expected; possibly nearer to three times. If the other gates were equally overstaffed, the thief couldn't imagine how the Guard could have enough other people on duty to even begin to keep the peace inside.
Then again, the sentinels clearly didn't expect anything remotely resembling “peace,” either inside or out. Shins was accustomed to the traditional armament of the City Guard: a simple rapier and a so-called “bash-bang,” a heavy pistol with a stock of reinforced brass rather than wood, to double as a brutally effective skull-cracker. And she did see those here, yes, but so, too, did she see guards wearing braces or bandoliers of additional, smaller flintlocks. She saw long-barreled muskets and gape-mawed blunderbusses; the wire-wrapped