Jon took a long draught from the waterskin the guard had passed to him before tossing it further down the line. Twisting his neck and flexing his shoulders, he spat off the side of the road; a thick, heavy gobbet. Erin caught the skin one handed, rolling her eyes in disgust at her companion’s habit. Behind them both, a third worker called for the skin to be passed down. Erin hurriedly took a drink before complying. The work was far from easy, and tempers could fray over things as small as an untimely passing of water; especially in the heat.
“Not that I’m complaining about them finally getting the road down, but they could’ve timed it better,” grumbled Jon. Having made sure the gravel surface was flat, he handed Erin one of the wide stones.
“’Not that I’m complaining’ is just another way of complaining,” replied Erin, wedging the stone into place. She took a glance up at the sun, the only sure measure of the time available to her, “The foreman said we’d be done by now anyway. The heat of the day’s almost over.”
“And we’d probably have finished by now if you’d stop your damn talking,” interjected Steven, another labourer. “You might not have screwed up the pattern and wasted so many curbstones.” He spat off to the side of the road, but not to clear his mouth as Jon had: the note of derision was clear.
“Even with the mix up, we’ve laid three times as many stones as you,” Jon replied, passing Erin a bigger stone. She carved a shallow hole for it in the gravel before putting it in. Curbstones needed to be bulkier, to hold the whole road in place and stop the constant downward pressure of traffic from shifting the stones.
Steven was suddenly very busy flattening the gravel in front of himself with his shovel.
The whole line of labourers worked diligently; pouring a layer of sand into the wide, shallow trench, flattening it, shovelling a layer of gravel onto the sand, flattening that and fitting the stones onto the gravel. Nevertheless, by the time the last stone was fitted in the portion their work-team had been assigned, the sun had begun to set on the horizon, and tempers were wearing thin.
“Poor effort by the lot of them” muttered Steven to Hugh, one of the other workers. “Foreman will probably make us redo the lot.”
Them was the select group of labourers who happened to be prisoners of the war. Erin wondered if Steven, previously a petty thief by trade, managed to get any comfort out of his misplaced arrogance, or whether he merely bitched out of habit.
The workers now stood to the side of the road, waiting for the foreman to finish his inspection of the day’s work. No road was perfect, and given that they had been given half the material and a third of the time needed to do the job properly, Erin hoped he might be lenient. Rather than watch in fear like most of the other workers, she cast her gaze aside, taking in her surroundings.
The poor quarter had taken a turn for the better under recent years, but the dilapidated structures would never fool any passing traveller as to what section of the city this was. True, there were no whores or beggars lining the streets like there would be in the slums of most cities, or indeed in the shanty town that lay outside the city’s walls, but this place still bore the stamp of poverty. The buildings were often askew in their design, or badly dilapidated. Still, there was a beautiful dusk on the horizon; alight with the colours of fire and earth, and Erin found comfort that this same dusk was shared by the rich who lived further into the city.
A tiny clatter of movement pulled her attention to a nearby rooftop. The outline of a figure was all she could see, due to the poor light, and even that was obscured by the roof itself. There was no reason to feel alarm at the clatter; there was no flash of metal, growled threat, or even any overt movement; but a shiver of premonition worked its way down Erin’s back nevertheless. There may have been no reason for alarm, but when Erin caught sight of a second form hunched over on another nearby rooftop, she realised there was no good reason for someone to be there either.
Her knuckles turned white as she forced herself to passively maintain her grip in the haft of her shovel. One of the things she had learned in her five years of service was that when one was a prisoner of war, and had learned not to fear their captors, there was little else in need of fearing. Except for fools like Steven she had no enemies; she had no reason for enemies. She had no wealth, she was not too loose with her tongue; she did not steal, was not lax about her work, despite what fools like Steven might say. Once every few months another labourer might go after her for her body, but after Jon had broken both of a man’s arms when he had acted on his unwanted attentions, few had their heart in it.
Erin tried to catch Jon’s eyes but couldn’t. He was staring intently at the foreman, who had stooped to examine a particular part of the stonework. This was not a good sign; if he had to stoop it meant the mistake was small, if he was noting small mistakes then they were in trouble. She nudged Jon with her foot, maintaining a perfect balance with the shovel and her other foot as she did so.
When he looked sharply at her she threw her gaze repeatedly to the roof and back to Jon, trying to get him to follow her eyes. Despite being brave, strong, protective and charming, Jon was by no measure a subtle man. “What?” he asked bluntly.
Erin shook her head slightly. “Over there, on the roof,” she whispered. This time he seemed to understand. Even before he looked over toward the roof his stance had shifted from worried and idle to worried and alert.
“The alley, on the left,” he muttered to her. There was a shimmer of swift movement, but of what or indeed how many, she could not be sure.
As if to relieve, or indeed ignite, the gathering tension; a clatter of hooves broke the near-silence. There was a flash of bright colour, as iridescent as the horizon Erin had been admiring, as the horsemen came into view. There were five of them, garbed as nobles and riding well-bred horses. Erin heard Jon curse under his breath.
The foreman called for the riders to stop and, reluctantly it seemed to Erin, they did so.
“What is the meaning of this obstruction?” the lead horseman demanded. She wore silks of red and orange, complementing her hair, of a deep burgundy.
“I am sorry milady, but the road ahead is unfinished. This section has been paved sufficiently, but ahead, the trenches will surely lame your horses.”
The labourers gave a collective sigh of relief; their work had been pronounced sufficient. Jon was becoming agitated, grinding his palms against the shaft of his shovel. “It’s an ambush”, he muttered to Erin.
“Ambush a priestess?” Erin’s question was one of logistics, rather than surprise. To ambush a priestess’s entourage was sacrilegious, but to do so inside the city bordered on the suicidal.
Jon grunted a dismissal. Surreptitiously he tried to signal to one of the guards assigned to the labour detail. Any overt gesture could warn the hidden ambushers, but if the guards weren’t warned, everyone in the street might end up dead. Meanwhile, the priestess was the focus of attention, laying into the foreman with all manner of colourful abuse.
Just as the attention of one of the guards, who had been leaning lazily against a nearby door, was caught, there was a clicking sound, followed by a shout.
Then, all hell broke loose.
