‘Stop making that sound, Sergeant,’ Keneb said.
Someone rode back out through the gate and where did they think they were going? There was a fight here! ‘Boyfriends of the dancing girls,’ he whispered, reaching for his sword.
‘Corporal,’ Keneb said. ‘Guide your sergeant here to the barricade to the left. You too, Throatslitter.’
Deadsmell said, ‘He’ll be fine in a moment, sir-’
‘Yes, just go.’
‘Aye, Fist.’
Boyfriends. Balm wanted to kill every one of them.
‘This city looks like a hurricane went through it,’ Cuttle said in a low mutter.
He had that right. The looting and all the rest was days old, however, and now it seemed that word of the Malazan breach was sweeping through in yet another storm-this one met with exhaustion-as the squad crouched in shadows near one end of an alley, watching the occasional furtive figure rush across the street.
They’d ambushed one unit forming up to march for the western gate. Quarrels and sharpers and a burner under the weapons wagon-still burning back there by the column of black smoke lifting into the ever-brightening sky. Took them all out, twenty-five dead or wounded, and before he and Gesler had pulled away locals were scurrying out to loot the bodies.
The captain had commandeered Urb and his squad off to find Hellian and her soldiers-the damned drunk had taken a wrong turn somewhere-which left Fiddler arid Gesler to keep pushing for the palace.
Forty paces down the street to their right was a high wall with a fortified postern. City Garrison block and compound, and now that gate had opened and troops were filing out to form up ranks in the street.
‘That’s where we find the commander,’ Cuttle said. ‘The one organizing the whole thing.’
Fiddler looked directly across from where he and his marines were hiding and saw Gesler and his soldiers in a matching position in another alley mouth. It’d be nice if we were on the roofs. But no-one was keen to break into these official-looking buildings and maybe end up fighting frenzied clerks and night watch guards. Noise like that and there’d be real troops pushing in from behind them.
Maybe closer to the palace-tenement blocks there, “and crowded together. It’d save us a lot of this ducking and crawling crap.
And what could be messy ambushes.