Sweat ran on his body. He mopped at his face, raked his hair back and tried to think despite the erotic mist that hazed the seeping brick, the effluvium of rubbish and the gutter. The bay's steps clopped along with a distant, dazed echo in the alley's wending transformation into a street where a dope den and a tavern maintained half-open doors and a clutch of krrf-dazed sleepers sitting in the mire outside. Music wailed; strings needed tuning. No one cared, least of all the player. The alley meandered on. The horse did, while the mist came and went.
Tempus would want him at that gathering at Peres. Tempus would want to talk to him, want sense out of him, would look at him with that piercing stare of his and spit him with it till he had spilled everything. That was what Ischade knew.
That was why Ischade wanted him out of there.
But then what, when he had fought with Crit and defied his commander and dealt with Jubal and through Jubal, with the gangs. There were ways and ways to die. He had invented one or two himself. Lying to Tempus offered worse. Desertion, dereliction. Treason.
He felt a stab of ecstasy, and one of utmost terror; and knew he ought to take that ring and fling it in the mud and go confess everything to Tempus, but that was against his very nature- he had never run for help, had never thrown himself at anyone's feet, never in his life. Fixing things took nerve. It took the raw guts to hang on to a situation long after it stopped being safe.
He was no boy, no twenty-five-year-old in shining armor, head full of glory stories. He had worked the Stepsons' shadowy jobs for a decade. He had just never had to think that Tempus himself might be involved in a mistake. The man the gods chose-But gods had self-interest right along with the rest of creation; gods might trick a man-might trick an empire, play games with souls, with a man who served their cause.
Tempus could be wrong. Gods know he could be wrong. He doesn't care for this town. I do. I can give it to him. Is that treason?
An empire runs on what works, doesn't it?
I've just got to live to get it working. Prove it to Crit. Prove it to Tempus. If it takes staying out of their way till I can get this thing organized-I know holes Crit doesn't.
Damn, no. They'll go for her.
He gripped the ring in his pocket, suffered a twinge that dimmed his vision and reminded him it was no small power the Stepsons might take on in Ischade. There would be fatalities. Calamity on both sides.
He made up his mind, then, what he had to do.
The sun was a glimmer of red-through-murk above Sanctuary's east when Ischade came to the simple little shop in the Bazaar; she came after a trek through Sanctuary's streets and in a sordid little room in the Maze left a dead man the world would little miss. That man left her disgusted, pricklish, soiled; and such was the charge of energies in the air of Sanctuary that she hardly felt that ebb of power his death made, felt not even a moment's relief from what ran along her veins and suffused her eyes and made that victim, in the last moment of his life, wish he had never existed at all.
It left not the least satisfaction; more, it left a gnawing terror that nothing would ever be enough, that there was no man in all the world sufficient to ease that power which threatened to break loose in the muttering storm and in her vitals. She blinded herself: she saw too much of hell and not enough of where she was going, and if a gang of Sanctuary's predatory worst had confronted her and seen her eyes this moment, at dawn's breaking, they would have stopped cold and slunk away in terror. She had become-known. Victims were harder to come by. Only fools approached her. And they were without sport and without surprise.
Tasfalen. Tasfalen. She clung to that name and that promise as to sanity itself a prey that offered wit, and hazard, and difficulty.
Tasfalen could be savored, over days. Put off and extended for a week-
She might, she reasoned with herself, make Strat understand.
She might-yet-get through that shell of unbelief Strat made around himself, teach him the things he had to know. He was ready for that. His infatuation was sufficient. That her hunger threatened him, this, everything-was unbearable.
It was weakness. And she had not yet accounted for Roxane. No scouring of the town had discovered her. That the dimwitted fiend had not found her tracks, but that she had discovered nothing to indicate that Roxane had not perished-did not make her secure in her present weakness. It was exactly the moment and the mode in which the Nisi would seek her out....
... Strike through Strat, through this stranger Tasfalen, through anything at all she least expected; most of all through a weakness....
And she was blind.
Knowing that, she came here, after a fruitless murder and a night's searching all of Sanctuary for Roxane's traces....
... To find the traces Roxane left on the future.
A light burned inside the little shop. So someone was astir this dawn. She rapped at a door she might have opened, waited like any suppliant at the fane.
Heavy steps came to it; someone opened the peephole and looked out and shut it rapidly.
She knocked a second time. And heard a higher voice than belonged with that tread, before the bar thumped back and the door opened inward.
The S'danzo Illyra stood to meet her, and that shadow to the side was Dubro, was a very distraught Dubro; and Illyra's face was tearstreaked. The S'danzo wrapped her fringed shawl about her as at-some ill wind sweeping through her door.
"So the news has come here," Ischade said in a low voice; and was pricklingly conscious of Dubro to the side. She forced herself to calm, concentrating on the woman only, on a mother's aching grief. "A mage is with your son since last night, S'danzo; I would be, but my talents are-awry tonight. Perhaps later. If they need me."
"Sit down." Illyra made a feverish movement of her hands, and Dubro cleared a bench. "I was making tea...." Perhaps the S'danzo conceived this as a visit of condolence, some sign of hope; she wiped at her eyes with brisk moves of a thin hand and turned to her stove, where a pot boiled. It was placatory hospitality. It was something else, perhaps.
"You see hope for your son in me?"
"I don't See Arton. I don't try." The S'danzo poured boiled tea through a strainer, one, two, three cups. Brought one to her and ignored the other two. / don't try. But a mother might, whose son lay sick in the palace, in company with a dying god. Priests or some messenger from Molin had been here already. Someone had told the S'danzo; or she had Seen it for herself, scryed it in the fracturing heavens, or tea leaves, gods knew.
And consolation might make a clearer mind in her service.
"Do you think they'll slight your son," Ischade asked, and sipped the tea, "for the other boy? Not if they value this city. I assure you. Randal's very skilled. You certainly needn't doubt which side the gods are on in your son's case. Do you?"
"I don't know ... I can't see."
"Ah. My own complaint. You want to know the present. I can tell you that." She shut her eyes and indeed it was little work to do, to sense Randal at work. "I can tell you the children are asleep, that there is little pain now, that the strength of the god holds your son in life. That a-" Pain assaulted her, an acute pain behind the eyes. Mage-fire. "Randal." She opened her eyes on the small, cluttered room again, on the S'danzo's drawn face. "I may be called to help there. I don't know. I have the power. But I'm hampered in using it. I need an answer. Where is Roxane?"
The S'danzo shook her head desperately. Gold rings swung and clashed. "I can't See that way-it's a present thing; I can't-"
"Find her tracks in the future. Find mine. Find your son's if you can. That's where she'll go. A man named Niko. She'll surely try for him. Tempus. Critias. Straton. Those are her major foci."