I suppose I should give thanks that the bottles hit the Kinariki wagoner and not me when they toppled from the taproom shelves. The Kinariki was paying his score at the time: his hand pulled across mine— courteously leaving his change behind—as he widened his eyes and sank to the floor without a sound. Do the gods expect my gratitude for that? Very well. I give thanks.
And that is all the gods get from me for the rest of my life, and you may tell them so if you’re much in the habit of chatting them up. Between one minute and the next, The Gaff and Slasher, my home for thirty years, came crashing to ruination around me, as I knew would happen the day I let those three women cross my threshold. The bottles were followed by every mug and wine glass I owned, and then by the hanging lamps. I thought javak at first, though we haven’t had one of those corkscrew storms since Rosseth was small. But when the two windows blew out—not in, out—as though they’d never been there, and the shelves behind the bar started pulling loose with a long squeal of old nails in old planks, I knew that this was no javak. The beer pumps were groaning and bucking under my hand, trying to plunge free of their sockets; the few rusty tag-ends of armor I had anchored to the walls to keep people from stealing them shot across the room like crossbow bolts. A hide-factor from Devarati got hit that time, but I think he recovered.
Earthquake? Earthquake? There wasn’t so much as a twitch out of that floor—my customers, the conscious ones, were down flat, clinging to it with their fingernails, like lizards to a wall, while benches and broken glass and overturned tables hurtled past them. Within thirty seconds, I was the one object still standing in the taproom, supported by nothing but outrage. For I never doubted the source of this catastrophe for one instant. Storms and volcanoes and family spats of the gods be damned—the cause, the bloody cause, was only a few bloody inches above my head, and I was already on my way up there even though I may not have seemed to be moving at all. I was just waiting for my feet to catch up with my fury.
Tikat staggered through the outside door just then, crouching low to stay on his own feet. When I came out from behind the bar to meet him, I felt like a very small boat pushing off from shore into a howling rapids. Tikat was yapping something at me and pointing upwards. I couldn’t hear him in the confusion, but I knew he must be asking about his mad white Lukassa. I shook my head and shouted back, “Where’s the boy? Have you seen the damned boy?”
He never bothered to answer, but only reeled on by me, treading on customers and armor bits alike, slipping in the puddles of mingled ale and wine, heading for the stair. I scrambled after him, pushing him out of the way well before we reached the landing. No one was going to break down that door but me.