Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 by Robert Asprin

Tempus's own daughter, Kama.
    And since the target of the murderous attack had been Straton, Critias's Sacred Band partner, the pair had teams out night and day, even in the midst of the Stepsons' preparations to withdraw-teams seeking to even the score with Zip's eyes and tongue: an old Band prescription for curing traitors. Lighting flared, a sheet sky-wide that banished darkness even on Shadow Street, so that Tempus saw backlit figures skulking from garbage heap to doorway in his wake.
    This was PFLS territory all right.
    The rain that accompanied a peal of thunder so loud it made the Tros horse flatten its ears and lower its head cared nothing for whom it wet or whom it unmasked: Both Tempus and his horse were only desultorily disguised-the horse with berry juice and trail mud and its "rider with dyes no better. The rain bounced fetlock high on cobbles and ran down the Riddler's oilskin mantle to his sharkskin-hiked sword, where it formed rivulets like spilled blood and just as red from the dye it washed.
    The specter of the man and horse (both too large and too well muscled for Sanctuary's own, both streaming water red as blood and splashing it behind, as the man called the Riddler loped his horse, oblivious to the torrent and the spray the horse's hooves kicked up, down the center of Red Clay Street) was one to stop a superstitious heart and make a criminal seek cover. Yet at the comer of West Gate Street, where the sudden downpour swept seaward to the wharves down the slope so deep and fast that rats and cats and pieces of less recognizable flesh were carried along in its currents as if the White Foal River had changed its course, three men stepped out from cover, barring his path, knee deep in water, crossbows drawn and blades unsheathed. A crossbow, in this wind so fierce it blotted out the Tros's snorts of warning, and in a rain so dense no cat-gut or woman's-hair bowstring could be dry, would shoot awry.
    Tempus knew it, and so did the three who stood there, daring him to ride them down.
    He considered it, though he'd sought a confrontation, annoyed by the boys with sweatbands around their foreheads and weapons better than street toughs ought to have.
    The Tros, having more sense and being a larger target, stopped still and craned its neck, imploring him with liquid eyes to remember why he'd come here, not just take an opportunity luck offered and waste it to vent some spleen and make his presence known.
    Still, this sort should have enough sense to fear him.
    That none did, that one stepped forward and said in a thick voice with a trace of gutter accent, "Looking for me, big fella? All your bugger boys are," gave the Riddler time enough to realize that, while he'd been looking for the rebel called Zip, Zip had also been looking for him.
    A noise behind, and then more sounds of moving men, gave the mounted soldier and his horse a good estimate of the odds without either turning to see the dozen rebels climbing down from rooftops and up from tunnels and out of cellar windows.
    Tempus's skin crawled: Pain wasn't something he sought, and with no death at the end of it, he could suffer infinitely more than other men. But it was his pride that leant him pause: The last thing he needed was to be taken hostage by the PFLS and held to ransom. Crit would never let him forget it. And the result for the PFLS would then be eradication-total and complete, not the minor harrassment Crit had time to field while busy with a hundred other tasks as he got two fighting units ready to depart a town that had precious little else between it and total anarchy.
    So Tempus said to the foremost fighter, "If you're Zip, I am," and slid off his horse, making fast its reins on its pommel: Whatever Tempus was worth, the Tros was irreplaceable, and would make for the Stepsons' barracks on a whistled command.
    But once the Tros, with teeth and hooves and blood lust spewing carnage in its wake, made for the barracks beyond the Swamp of Night