Bathhouses, stables, goldsmiths and silversmiths, jewellers, tailors, dressmakers, and establishments where a person of quality might throw their money after cards or dice, sample poisons that twist the mind in strange ways, buy the company of a young bed-partner, or satisfy less common urges proscribed by the laws of both state and Church.
And all of it was burning.
Nona guessed that the Path-mage she had killed might have been part of Adoma’s Fist. She still had hope that the battle-queen’s wars on her other border had kept the Fist in the east. The idea they might be here, among the horde, scared her in a way that mere numbers could not. She knew that their role was to crack open fortresses and cities that defied their queen, and the west held no bigger defiance than Verity.
If the Fist were here then probably they were holding their strength in reserve and waiting to see if the walls would fall to more conventional assault. That or just waiting for enough defenders to mass in one place so that when the Fist struck it would cause maximum carnage.
In Nona’s brief period of contemplation two men fell from the wall, hammering into the cobbled street close enough that she felt the warm spatter of their blood across her face. She moved quickly out of the danger zone. The corpses of other casualties that had fallen since the last clear-up lay strewn around, Scithrowl among them. Further back the buildings not yet aflame had been opened to the most badly injured. Their screams, as overworked healers bound wounds and set bones, rose to challenge the clamour from the walls above.
Nona pushed on, past the wounded, the supplies, a skittish donkey standing in the stays of an empty wagon, past the reserves and into an alley leading between the first buildings.
The stink of charring flesh pursued Nona towards the palace. She made her way towards the emperor’s spires visible even above the roofs of mansions. In a street still a hundred yards shy of the palace walls a line of grim-faced men from Crucical’s elite palace guard turned Nona aside. Seeing the suspicion in their leader’s eyes as he tried to see past the mud on her tunic she didn’t stay to argue.
Nona’s goal now was to reunite with her friends. The smoke-haunted streets were echoingly empty. Spent arrows lay here and there, curious in isolation, flames licked up amid the apple trees in a nearby garden where one of the Scithrowl fire-pots had landed. All the windows were shuttered as if the grand houses had closed their eyes to the day’s horrors.
Nona hunted for her serenity and sought direction. Her thread-bonds with Kettle and with Ruli had been pulling her in different directions but now they started to converge. She followed their guide, jogging along broad streets between mansions with boarded windows. She worked her way around blocked and burning roads, seeking to join up with Abbess Wheel and the convent party.
A body lay by the gates of one pillared manse, a white-haired old lady whose broken string of Marn pearls was scattered across the flagstones. An arrow protruded from her chest. Nona found it hard not to believe all this a dream. The mighty Verity, rich, powerful, untouched by war for generations. Before nightfall Scithrowl warriors would prowl where the nobility promenaded the evening before. Only days ago Nona had met Lano Tacsis in these very streets. Much as she wanted the man dead she wanted his soldiers lined up in the defence of the city more. It would have been a poor time for her to have killed their leader. Even so, she hoped the Scithrowl would catch him and give him a cruel death.
Nona turned onto another wide, tree-lined avenue where but for the drifting smoke everything could have been normal. The wind gusted, clearing the air, and there out of nowhere was Abbess Wheel, crozier held aloft as a golden beacon, half of Sweet Mercy hard on her heels.
In the chaos of the defence Abbess Wheel found nobody of sufficient authority and interest to allocate Sweet Mercy’s strength with any direction or goal. Rather than commit her force blind, Wheel had sent Kettle and Bhenta to scout for any Scithrowl forces already at work within the walls. She kept Nona close to monitor Kettle’s observations through her thread-bond.
In the meantime the abbess gathered her flock in the shelter of a high-walled garden where no stray arrow would find either novice or nun,