"How did Roxane get in there?" Tempus asked once Ischade was gone. "How? Not even the gods can violate moat's sanctuary."
"Randal?" Molin asked.
The mage pushed himself away from Jihan's healing hands. He started to speak but the words were too great an effort. Quivering, he sank back to his knees; tears ate their way down his cheeks. "They had him for a year, Riddler," he pleaded for understanding. "He hates her. He remembers and he hates her but when she comes for him.... A year, Riddler. 0 gods, after a year he remembers; he hates but he can't-won't-refuse."
Critias pounded the windowframe. "Seh!" he said, watching the smoke rising from the city's rooftops. The Nisi obscenity was somehow appropriate. If the gods, what remained of them, had intended to cripple what remained of order and competence in Sanctuary they could not have done a better job. He had even allowed the fatal thought-that the situation could not possibly get worse-to percolate through his consciousness.
"Commander," he said with a heavy sigh. "You'd better take a look at this."
Tempus followed the lines of his lieutenant's outstretched arm. He said nothing, so the others-Molin, Jihan, Shupansea, and finally Randal-crowded around the broken window.
"It's all up now." Torchholder turned away and slouched against the wall.
Jihan closed her eyes, reaching deep into her primal knowledge of all water and salt water in particular. "We've got a bit of time. With the tides they won't be able to enter the harbor until after sundown."
"I don't expect you'd be able to send them back the way they came?" Molin asked.
Shupansea tried looking, staring, and leaning perilously far out the window and saw nothing but the myopic fuzziness of the wharves and the ocean beyond it. "Send what back?" she inquired with evident irritation.
"The Rankan Empire, my lady," Tempus explained. "Come to find out what's going on in this forsaken backwater."
"How many ships?"
"Lots," the big man said with a feral grin.
The Beysa stepped back from the window, suddenly remembering that she had dismissed her guard and that none of those between herself and the door could be considered willing allies to her cause. "We must make preparations," she said, edging backward toward escape.
"You put the fear of Ranke's strong right arm into her," Crit snorted, once the nervous woman had disappeared down the narrow steps. The lone ship fighting its way through the tidal currents carried no more than two hundred men, including oarsmen, and was equipped for tribute, not combat.
"I should have killed her," Jihan muttered.
"You would never have left this room alive," Tempus informed her.
"I? I would never have left this room? I could have frozen that little bitch before she knew what happened to her."
"And what would your father have said to that?" Tempos retorted.
The Froth Daughter went red-eyed and icy for a moment. She raised a fist toward the Stepson's commander and shook it at him. Her scale armor creaked as she stomped back to the table where Niko was moaning softly. Molin peered intently out the window lest she see his smile; Crit was fighting laughter himself and nearly lost the battle when he glimpsed the priest biting his lower lip.
"I'm taking Stealth back downstairs," Stormbringer's daughter announced, effortlessly holding the grown man in her arms. "Is anyone coming with me?"
She had strength and power it was dangerous to mock, however immature its manifestation. Not even Randal, who of the men was the most clearly respectful of gods and magic, dared to answer her.
"What now?" Randal asked, easing himself onto the stool Ischade had used. Jihan's touch had cleansed and sealed the surfaces of his wounds; he had his own healing resources to call on but his continuing tremors indicated that the little mage had not yet paid the full price for the day's exertions.
With the last of the women departed, Tempus felt his confidence returning: "For you-rest. If we need you again we'll need you healthy. Go stay with Jihan and Niko if you can't finish the job yourself over at the Mageguild. Crit, you get someone in that damn house others. And get Kama-however you have to do it. The rest of us will see about restoring the appearance of order in this damn place before that ship docks."
He looked out the window again as trumpets blared from the gateways; Shupansea had evidently reached her advisors. Squads of Burek fighters, deadly swordsmen and archers despite their baggy silk pantaloons and polished scalps, were double-timing across the courtyards. Either all Beysib were nearsighted like their empress and believed the entire Rankan fleet loomed beyond the horizon, or they were taking no chances.
When the triple portrait had burned, the fire had touched Tempus-not as it had touched Randal, but purging him of the dark associations between Death's Queen, Niko, and himself. The shock, and the pain, were still strong-he'd kill the witch when he could for the crippling scars she'd left in Niko- but the compulsion he'd felt since the black storms in the capital was fading.
"Damn plague town," he said to himself. "Infecting everything it touches with its disease. Let the fish people have it."
Torchholder looked over at him. "You just. might have something there, Riddler." He liked the idea coalescing in his thoughts; unconsciously he tugged at his sleeves as a sense of competence returned to him. "Now, then-whatever we might feel about the long-term implications of Theron's delegation I think we all agree that this is not the time to have any outsider wandering around. Right?"
The other men nodded reluctant agreement.
"We also know them well enough to know that once they suspect we're hiding anything they'll make imperial nuisances out of themselves. And they're suspicious right now just from the smoke." He didn't wait for them to nod this time. "They'll want to be out there unless we give them a bloody good reason for staying exactly where we put them: plague-quarantined for their own protection."
Critias arched an eyebrow. "Priest, I could find myself liking you."
Ischade made her way to the White Foal alone. She'd separated from her Beysib escort near the Peres house when the anarchists and so-called revolutionaries had challenged them. With their twirling swords they'd seemed more than a match for the poorly-armed quartet that had come charging out of the alley and she had been grateful for the opportunity to slide into the shadows unnoticed.
The house had called out to her: her possessions, her lover, her magic, the tiny ring now on Haught's slender finger. Not long before-before her explosive journey to the palace-the call would have been irresistible. She would have had the power to sunder any wards Roxane had concocted. And she would have done just that: gone blundering into another abortive confrontation with the Nisi witch.
If the battle within Niko's rest-place had done nothing else it had vented the excess of power which had blighted her vision since Tempus had returned to Sanctuary and ordered the destruction of the Globes of Power. Purged and refreshed, she perceived the wards not simply as Haught's betrayal or Rox-ane's arrogance but as the finely strung trap that they were.
They think I am still blind to the finer workings, she'd said to the raven perched on the stone finial beside her. Their first mistake. Let's see if there are others.
No one bothered her as she picked her way across the open expanse of mud surrounding the new White Foal bridge. It was probable that none of the bravos running between Downwind and the more profitable riots uptown could see her though even she was uncertain how far her magic, or her curse, extended in such directions, now that her power had resumed its normal proportions.