"Upstairs," she murmured, fending off his hands from her. "Upstairs."
Somehow they got there, him carrying her part of the way, till she lost a shoe and he stopped for it; and she pulled him up the steps by the hand, damning the shoe and the laces and all, which he started undoing at the top of the stairs. She shed ribbons all the way to the bedroom, and they fell down together in a cloud of silk sheets and her petticoats, which he made shift to shove out of their way, layer after layer.
He got the last laces of her bodice and the damned corset finally, and she lay there with her ribs heaving in the sheer sensuous pleasure of clear breaths and the feel of his hands on her bare skin.
She knew, when the sense had gotten back to her along with her wind, that she was the most utter fool. But it had all gone too far for more thinking than that.
"I love you," he said, "Moria."
He had to, of course. She knew that, the way that the air thrummed and whispered and the blood ran in her veins with that kind of magic Haught had put into her.
Am I a witch myself? What's happening to me?
She stared into Tasfalen's face, that of a man bewitched.
Or what is he? 0 gods, save him! Shalpa, save me!
"He's quiet again," Randal said. Randal's foolish face was beaded with sweat and white under its freckles, and his hair hung down in sweat-damp points; and Tempus stared bleakly at the mage, his hand curled round a cup that sat on a polished table, there amongst his maps and his charts. Behind the mage in the doorway Kama stood, looking frayed herself.
Kama. Gods alone remembered how many others gone to bones and dust. She was smart as she was likely to be: she had that hard shining in her eyes, about her face, that he knew all too welclass="underline" it was youth's conviction it was without sin or error; and if he troubled he could think his way through the maze of all the things she thought, but he did not trouble: there was enough to occupy his mind, and Kama was only a shallow part of it, shallow as a young fool was likely to be, though complex in her potentials. She had the potential for surprises to an enemy; was one part crazy and one part calculating and he had not missed the gravitation of the two points that were her and Molin. The look of a young woman in love? Not in Kama. The look of a young woman with a complex of things seething in a still callow mind, which muddle he evaded with a mental shrug of something close to pain: another complex fool, not born to be a fool ultimately, but at that stage of growing when the wisest were prone to the most wearisome, repetitious mistakes as if they were new in the world. He knew what she had come to say. He read it before she opened her mouth, and that irritated him to the point of fury.
"I'm going back into the town," she said. "I can't sit still here."
Of course she couldn't. Who of her age and her nature could? The battle was going on here, but it was nothing she could get her hands into, so she went out to find trouble.
"I'm going to find this Haught," she said, and he could have mouthed the words a second before they left her mouth.
"Of course you are," he said. And did not ask Where are you going to look? because of course she had no particular idea. Haught was the witch's servant; Haught was the trouble they had had previous; and Ischade-was by far the more interesting question.
Ischade was keeping a promise. Or she was not, and a bargain was off. That was something it would take time to leam. The souls of his dead, she had promised him. And the safety of his living comrades as far as she could guarantee it. There was something deadly dangerous in the wind and the woman was onto it, doing battle with it-if she had told the truth. The possibility that she had lied was one of those lines down which he was quite willing to think, down which he had been thinking continually.
"Find Ischade while you're at it," he said. "Ask her whose Haught is."
Kama blinked. He watched her put it together. He watched the caution dawn in her immature-pretematurally mature mind, and watched the predictable thoughts go on, how she would do this, how she would need more caution than she had planned on in the other business.
Good. Things in the lower town wanted more caution than Kama was wont to use.
"Get out of here," he said then, staring past her and thinking what the world would be like without Niko, if they lost; if they lost Niko they would lose a great deal more than one man; and he, personally-Niko was one who engaged him on all levels, on too many levels. Niko was one who could cause him pain because he could give him so much else, and without Niko, that magnet for the world's troubles, that fool of fools who thought the world his responsibility-Niko almost made him feel it was, when he knew better. Niko was vulnerable the way his kind was when the uncaring little fools got past his guard; when the holding-action stopped and the god came thundering in to wrench the world apart again and Niko was the one standing rearguard to fools more vulnerable than himself. One like Kama was walking around and Niko was lying there in a bed losing a fight far too abstract for Kama to understand. She went out to do battle.
He did his fighting from this table, with a cup in hand. And could not, now that he wanted to surrender, find the god. Even that, he might have foreseen.
Randal stayed when Kama had gone. Randal was a fool of Niko's breed; and for a moment Randal, sweating and white as he was, looked at him with Nik's kind of understanding, and came and took the cup out of his hand, which gesture might have gotten another man killed. Foolish man. Foolish little mage. Who blundered his way along with more deftness and a keener sight and more guts than most ever had at their best.
So Tempus let him do it.
"You won't dream," Randal said, "if you pass out."
"I won't pass out," Tempus said, patiently, oh so patiently. "I heal, remember. There isn't any damn way. Now I want the damn god I can't get there."
"I've got a drug might... put you down a bit. If you let it."
"Try it." It took patience to say that. He already knew it would not work, but Randal was trying.
No god answered him. Not even Stormbringer, who was- gods knew where. There was not a cloud to be had out there.
Randal went away to find-whatever concoction he meant to try. Tempus filled his glass again, perversely, in a cold fury at his own vitality, a fury on the edge of panic. His body was not even in his control when the god was out of it. He could not do so simple a thing as fall asleep, when the ache of the world got too much. He healed, and that was what he did. He healed of the very need of sleep and the effects of alcohol and the effects of drugs and every other mortality. Askelon could have come and claimed him by force. But the gods were not answering today.
None of them bloody cared.
Even Abarsis failed him. Or was held, somewhere.
II
A door opened somewhere far away. Ordinarily this would have alarmed Moria, though servants came and went for their own reasons. This sounded deeper and heavier than inside doors.
But just at that moment Tasfalen did something which quite took her senses inside out; and in the danger in which they both pursued this moment she cursed herself for butterflies and turned her mind to doing something which she had learned off a hawkmask lover-easy to pick a man's brain when he was feeling that good. Then Tasfalen gave as good back, and better- Shalpa and Shipri, she had never known a man with his ways, never bedded with a man who knew what he knew, not even Haught, never Haught-
"Oh," she said, "oh," and "0 gods!"-when she brought her head up from the pillows and saw the dark figure standing in the doorway.