"Kill me," Strat begged when Stilcho bent over him.
Their eyes locked. Stilcho felt himself assaulted and dragged to a level of consciousness he had never, living or dead, imagined.
Strat was going to be tortured; was going to be systematically stripped of every image his memory held. Death would spare him nothing but the pain and, for Strat, the pain would not be the true torture. Stilcho remembered his own torture at Moruth's hands. He shrank with the knowledge that no little heroics, like a slash to the carotid, would spare this man. He had never, at his best, risen above little heroics but he would now, for Straton. The determination came instantaneously and suffused the resurrected man with a glow that would have chilled the Nisi witches beyond the door-had they seen it.
"It won't work. Ace," he informed the Stepson as he contrived to make him a bit more comfortable on the floor. "Think of something else. Think of lies until you believe them. Haught can't see the truth; he can only see what you believe is the truth." He ripped a comer from Strat's blood-soaked tunic and tucked it up his sleeve. "Don't fight them; just lie."
Strat blinked and groaned. Stilcho hoped he'd understood. There wasn't time for more. The door was opening. He prayed he wouldn't have to watch.
"I said the table," Haught said in his soft, malice-laden voice.
Stilcho shrugged and thought, carefully, about being dead. But Haught had no energy for the likes of him, not with Roxane-Stilcho's empty eye saw Roxane, not Tasfalen-hovering behind him and Strat helpless at his feet.
"Find me Tempus's secrets," a man's voice with strange, menacing inflections commanded. "If they hide the son from me, I'll have the father."
The witch produced the globe from wherever she had hidden it. Stilcho clutched his sleeve where the bloody cloth was hidden and backed toward the door. They didn't notice him leaving-or perhaps they did. They were laughing, a laughter that rose in pitch until it blended with the maniacal whine of the globe itself. But they didn't call him back as he edged around the newel-post and slunk upstairs.
It was not difficult to find Moria. She had only gotten to her bedroom doorway before succumbing to the horror around her. Stilcho found her with her arms wrapped around her ankles and her Rankan-gold hair spilling past her knees onto the floor.
"Moria!"
She lifted her head to look at him-blankly at first, then wide-eyed. Her breath sucked in and held, ready to scream if he came any closer.
"Moria, snap out of it," he demanded in an urgent whisper.
Her scream was nothing more than a series of mewling squeaks as she scuttled away from him. She froze, except for her eyes, when her spine butted into the wainscoting. Stilcho, no stranger to utter terror himself, felt pity for her but had no time to give in to it. Grabbing her wrist he hauled her, one-handed, to her feet and slapped her hard when the mewling threatened to become something louder.
"For godssakes get control of yourself-if you want to live through this at all." He shook her hard and she went silent, but alert, in his arms. "Where's a window that overlooks the street?" He had never willingly come to the uptown house, never wanted to remember the times that he had.
Moria pulled back from him. Her bodice, much torn and retied, fell down from her shoulders. She did not seem to notice but Stilcho, with death still in his nostrils and hell itself downstairs in the kitchen, knew beyond all doubt that he was as alive as he had ever been.
"Moria, help me." He took her arm again. Haught hadn't slighted her with his magic: tear-streaked and disheveled she retained her beauty. 0 gods, he wanted to go on living.
"You're ... you're-" She put a hand out to touch the good side of his face.
"A window," he repeated even after she fell against him, burying her face in a shirt that had seen better days. "Moria, a window-if we're going to help him and save ourselves."
She pointed at the window beyond her bed and sank back to the floor when he left her to fight, oh so silently, with its casement.
Stilcho panicked for a second when the salt-rusted window swung wide open. Not from the noise, because Strat screamed then, but from the wards he could see shimmering like whorehouse silks flush against the outer walls. He forgot to breathe until his heart pounded and his vision blurred, but it seemed the wards were for larger forces and were not affected by the iron-and-glass casement.
The horse was still out there: Strat's bay horse that Ischade had painstakingly restored to life. It danced away from the fires burning beyond the wards and the occasional bravo racing down the street but it had no intention of abandoning its vigil-not even when Stilcho reached out to it as he had learned to reach for all of Ischade's creations. Eyes that were red, vengeful, and not at all equine regarded him for a moment, then turned away.
Stilcho stepped back from the window, smiling. He retained the ability to see the workings of magic but magic no longer took notice of him. It was a very small price to pay for the ordinary sensations returning to him. Moreover, it was one he had anticipated. He grabbed a handful of rumpled linen from the bed and had begun tearing it into strips before he noticed Moria huddled on the floor.
"Get dressed."
She stood up, examining the tangled ribbons of her bodice. Heaving an exasperated sigh, Stilcho dropped the sheets and gripped her wrists. The soft flesh of her breasts rested against his hands.
"Gods, Moria-your clothes, Maria's clothes! You can't get out of here dressed like that."
Moria's face lost its complete vacantness as the idea penetrated through her terror that Stilcho-living, breathing Stilcho-would somehow get her out of here. She yanked the ribbons free, tearing the dress and its memories from her, diving into the ornate chests where, beneath the courtesan's trappings which Ischade had endowed her with, her stained and tattered street clothes remained.
She made a fair amount of noise in her industry, hurling unwanted lace and satin to the floor behind her, but between the globe's whine and Strat's screams it was doubtful that anyone in the kitchen heard or cared about the commotion upstairs. Stilcho finished ripping the linen.
Blood would draw the bay horse. Stilcho pulled the bloody rag from his sleeve and tied it to the linen. He'd used blood to bring the dead across water into the upper town. Strat's blood would bring the horse into conflict with the wards, chipping away at the flaws in them.
"What are you doing?" Moria demanded, forcing the last of the rounded, Rankan contours into a now snug Ilsigi tunic.
"Making a blood lure," he replied, lowering the makeshift rope and swinging the dull red knot at its end toward the horse.
She bounded across the room. "No. No!" she protested, struggling to take the cloth from him. "They'll see; they'll know. We can get out across the roof."
Stilcho held her off with one arm and went back to swinging the lure. "Wards," he muttered. He had the bay's attention now. Its eyes, in his other vision, were brighter; its coat rippled with crimson anger.
But wards and warding had no meaning to Moria, though she was one of Ischade's. She rammed stiff fingers into his gut and made a lunge for freedom. It was all he could go to grab her around the waist, keeping her barely inside the house. The linen slipped from his hands and fluttered to the street below. Moria whimpered; he pressed her face against his chest to muffle the sound. Ward-fire, invisible to her but excruciating nonetheless, dazzled her hands and forearms.
"We're trapped!" she gasped. "Trapped!"
Hysteria rose in her face again. He grabbed her wrists, knowing the pain would shock her into silence.