"I did not know. Lord Stormbringer."
Then know now! The universe throbbed with Stormbringer's pique. I am Sanctuary's god. Until the children claim their birthright I am their, and Sanctuary's, guardian. Fear only me!
Of course they fear you. A second presence, feminine but no less awesome, wove its way through and around the presence that was Stormbringer. Mortals fear everything. They fear the woman's god more than they fear the man's god, and they fear a woman without a god most of all. You must tell them where to find the witch-woman who killed my snakes.
The deities twisted around each other but did not mix or merge. Molin knew he was in the presence of what was already being called the Barren Marriage. Yet there was something like mortal affection, as well as immortal lust, between these two. He felt the part that was Stormbringer contract, and an upright figure with the head of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and the lower parts of a bull manifested itself out of the red mist.
"I cannot tell you where she is," the apparition said in a voice that was both male and female. "There are things forbidden even to me. Demonkind is brother and sister to you mortals, but no kin to gods. The S'danzo have the greater part of the truth; the Nisi witches have the rest.
"Roxane promised the souls of the children-or her own if she failed. She is not where you or I can find her-and she is not fallen among the demons. What I cannot find, what the Archdemon cannot find, must lie in Meridian or beyond."
Molin discovered that he, like Stormbringer, had become corporeal and, so far as he could tell, very much the man he had always been. Tracing his fingers along the familiar, imperfect embroidery of his sleeves, he considered what he knew of the topology of nonmortal spheres and Meridian, the realm of dreams where ASkelon held sway. He thought about ASkelon as well and reflected that if there were one entity-ASkelon hardly qualified as a man-who could both complicate and resolve their problems, the Dream Lord was that entity.
He made the mistake, however, of thinking that because he felt like himself, he was himself and slipped into rapid considerations as to which of the players would be best for the part.
"That is not for you to decide," the lion reminded Molin, baring its glistening teeth. "ASkelon has already made his choice."
"Tempus will not go."
"Give him this, then." Stormbringer laid a linen scarf across Molin's unwillingly outstretched hands.
The netherworld that was the gods' universe fractured. Molin held the scarf to his face for protection as the lion-head apparition became hard, dark pellets that beat him into a dizzying backward spiral. The scream he had left frozen in his throat tore loose and engulfed him.
"It's over now; relax."
A strong, long-fingered hand was wrapped around his wrist, pulling his hands away from his face. The hard pellets were wind-driven raindrops. His hands, Molin realized as he unclenched them, were empty. He was on his back-had fallen from his horse.
"You're back with us ordinary folk," the woman told him as she yanked on his cloak and twisted his torso until his shoulders were propped on a relatively dry pile of straw. "Are you all right? Your tongue? Your lips?"
He pushed himself up on his elbows. There wasn't a muscle, bone, or nerve that didn't ache-as it always did after Stormbringer. But it was, he told her while still trying to understand where he was and what had happened, nothing worse than that.
"They say that my... Tempus would bite through his lip, or break a bone. I never saw it. He wouldn't notice it, really. You're not him, though."
"Kama?" Molin guessed.
He was in some crude shelter-a lean-to the shepherds used, by the smell of it. The worst of the weather was deflected, anyway. She'd hung a lantern from the center-pole but it didn't provide much light and the priest had only seen Tempus's daughter a few times, mostly when she was considerably younger.
"I saw you stiffen up like that. I guessed what would happen. It wasn't Vashanka, was it?"
"No."
She squatted down beside him; the lantern lifted her profile from the surrounding darkness. She wore a youth's leather tunic, laced tight and revealing nothing. Her hair was twisted into a knot at the crown of her head and was clinging to her face in damp tendrils where it had come loose. She shuddered and went looking for her own cloak which, when she found it, was covered with mud and useless from the rain.
"Did the others go on?" Molin asked.
Kama nodded. "They'll have reached the palace by now. Strat knows I'm with you. He won't say anything."
Molin looked into the lantern. He should, by right, stagger to his feet and hie himself back to the palace. His life was full of gods, magic, and the intrigue that went with them. There was no room for love, or lust-especially not with Kama.
"You needn't have stayed with me," he said softly, shifting the focus of his analysis and persuasion away from politics.
"I was curious. All winter I've been hearing about the Torch. Almost everything that worked had your fingerprints on it. Nobody seems to like you very much, Molin Torchholder, but they all seem to respect you. I wanted to see for myself."
"So you saw me falling off my horse and foaming at the mouth?"
.She gave him a quick half-smile. "Will the Third actually share that brandy and meat?"
"I don't have the Empire or the priesthood behind me anymore," Molin admitted. "I can't coerce a man's loyalty and I can't inspire it either-I know my limits. I bribed the cooks myself long before I left the palace." A stream of water broke through the branch-and-straw roof, hitting him full in the face. "No one, if he's done work for Sanctuary, should be out on a night like this without some reward. If the Third went to the barracks, they got their share."
"What about you?"
"Or you?"
Kama shrugged and picked at the loose threads of a bandage tied around her right palm. "I won't find what I want at the barracks."
"You won't find it with the Third-"
Kama turned to stare darkly at him.
Stormbringer, the witches, the children: everything that was important in the larger scheme of things fell from Molin's thoughts as he sat up, closing his hands over hers. "-You won't find it with any of his people."
It was a thought that had, apparently, already occurred to her, for she unwound into the straw beside him without a heartbeat's hesitation.
They returned to the palace after the sky had turned a soft, moist gray but before, they hoped, any of those whom Molin had to see were awake. There was nothing to set them apart from any other weary, soaked travelers coming to shelter within the palace walls. Molin did not help her from the saddle or see to the stabling of her horse. True, he found himself gripped by an emotion uncomfortably close to sudden love, but not even that was enough to make him a fool. He would have said nothing if she had wheeled her horse around and headed back toward the Maze; he said the same when she followed him up the gatehouse stairs.
He led the way to the Ilsig Bedchamber where, in consideration of all that hadn't happened during the night, he expected to find Jihan, the Stormchildren, Niko, and the bedlam residents. He found, instead, a funereally quiet chamber with only Seylalha hovering between the cradles.
"The mere's guild?" Kama inquired, reading the same omens the priest did. "The mage's?"
Molin shook his head. His mind reached out to that distant comer where his Nisi magic heritage, the gods, or his own luck sometimes placed reliable inspirations. "With the Beysa," he said slowly, then corrected himself: "Near the snakes."
When the Beysib arrived in Sanctuary they had brought with them seventy of the mottled brown eggs of their precious beynit serpents. These eggs, packed in unspun silk, had been installed in a specially reconstructed room where a hypocaust kept the stones comfortably warm. The eggs had hatched before the start of winter and the room itself, filled with the fingerling snakes, had become the favorite haunt of the Beysa and her immediate entourage.