"That's Strat down there. Straton! They'll come for him. The horse will bring them, Moria. Ischade, Tempus: they'll all come for him-and us."
"No, no," she repeated, her eyes white all around. "Not Her. Not Her-"
Stilcho hesitated. He remembered that fear; that all-consuming fear he felt of Ischade, of Haught, of everything that had had power over him-but he'd forgotten it as well. Death had burned the fear out of him. He felt danger, desperation, and the latent death that pervaded this house and this afternoon-but bowel numbing fear no longer had a claim on him.
"I'm going to save Strat-hide him until they come for him. I'm going to save me, too. I'm lucky today, Moria: I'm alive and I'm lucky. Even without the horse...."
But he wasn't without the bay horse. The bloody rag had landed on the carved stone steps that had been, many years ago, the Peres family's pride. The bay pounded on the steps, surrounded but unaffected by ward-fire. It scented Strat's blood soaking into the wood planks of the lower hallway and heard his anguish. Trumpeting a loyalty that transcended life and death, it reared, flailing at the ephemeral flames which engulfed it. Stilcho watched as the mortal image of the horse vanished and the other one became a black void.
"Moria, the back stairs, the servant's stairs to the kitchen, where are they? It's only a matter of time."
Candlelight flickered over Ischade's dark-clad body. She had collapsed backwards into her silken lair. Her hair made tangled webs around her face and shoulders. One arm arced around her head, the other fell limply across her waist; both were marked with dark gashes where the priest's glass had cut her. Ischade had death magic, not healing.
She was, if not oblivious to her exhausted body, unmindful of it. If her efforts were successful there would be time enough for rest and recovery. She continued manipulating the bonds which made all she had ever owned a focus for her power. She set resonances at each flawed boundary, reinforced them as motes of warding eroded away and tried not to feel the tremors that were Straton.
It was not her way to move with such delicate precision- but it was the only way she had left. Balancing her power through every focal object within the Peres house which could contain it, she hoped to build her presence until she could pull from all directions and burst the warding sphere Roxane had created. She had discarded the thread tying her to the bay horse. She had never regarded the creature as hers but only as a gift, a rare gift, to her lover. Thus the moment when it had scented Strat's blood passed unnoticed but the instant when it penetrated the wards was seared into her awareness.
Her first response was a heartfelt curse for whatever was causing havoc in her neat, tedious work. The curse soared and circled the wards until Ischade understood she had an ally within the house. She examined the small skein of living and dead within whom she had a focus and found that one, Stilcho, was no longer anchored. Stilcho, whom Haught had stolen and fate had set to living freedom.
Smiling, she pushed her imperceptible awareness past the ward-consuming emptiness.
"Haught," she whispered, weaving into his mind. "Remember your father. Remember Wizardwall. Remember slavery. Remember the feel of the globe in your hands before she stole it from you. She does not love you, Haught. Does not love your fine Nisi face while she wears a Rankan one. Does not love your aptness while she is trapped in a body that has none. Oh, remember, Haught; remember every time you look on that face."
The ambitious mind of the ex-slave, ex-dancer, ex-apprentice shivered when Ischade touched it. Foolish child-he had believed she would not look for him again and had taken none-of the simple steps to ensure that she could not. She sealed her hypnotic surgery with a gentle caress on the ring he wore: the ring he had thought to use against her.
Ischade retreated, then, behind the little statues, the gewgaws and the sharp knives she had scattered throughout the house. Her thoughts would eat at a mind already disposed to treason just as the essence of the bay horse ate the ward fire. It was only a matter of time.
"You have to eat. Magic can't do everything."
Randal opened his mouth to agree and received a great wooden spoonful of Jihan's latest aromatic posset. His eyes bulged, his ears reddened, and he wanted nothing more than to spit the godsawful curdled lump to the floor. But the Froth Daughter was watching him and he dared do nothing but swallow it in one horrendous gulp. His hands were immobilized in gauze slings, suspended in oval buckets filled with a salted solution of the Froth Daughter's devising. His own magical resources were insufficient to guide the spoon to his mouth- if he had been so inclined in the first place.
He had been to the Mageguild and found his treatment there even less pleasant. Get rid of the globe; get rid of the demon; get rid of the witches, his colleagues had told him-and don't come home again until you do. So he'd come back to the palace to be tended by Jinan and to fret over the way fate was unfolding for him.
"You tried," Jihan assured him, setting the bowl aside. "You did your best."
"I failed. I knew what happened and I let her trick me. Niko would have understood; I knew that Niko would have understood why we had him down here. But I listened to her instead." He shook his head in misery; a lock of hair fell down to cover his eyes. Jihan leaned forward to brush it back, moving carefully to avoid the shiny, less severe bums on his face or the singed, almost bald, portion of his scalp that still smelled of the fire.
"We've all made more than our share of mistakes in this," Tempus commiserated from the doorway. He unfastened his cloak, letting it drop to the floor as he strode across the room. The hypocaust fires had been banked for two days but the room was still the warmest, by far, in the palace. "How is he?" he asked when he stood beside Niko.
The young man's body showed few traces of his ordeal. The swellings and bruises had all but disappeared; his face, in sleep, was serene and almost smiling.
"Better than he should be," Jihan said sadly. She laid her hand lightly on Niko's forehead. The half-smile vanished and the hell-haunted mercenary strained against the leather straps binding him to the pallet. "The demon has his body completely now and heals as it wishes," she acknowledged, lifting her hand. Niko, or his body, quieted.
"You're sure?"
She shrugged, reached for Niko again, then restrained that impulse by gripping Tempus's arm instead. "As sure as I am of anything where he's concerned."
"Riddler?" The hazel eyes flickered open but they did not focus and the voice, though it had the right timbre, was not Niko's. "Riddler, is that you?"
"Gods-no," Tempus took a step forward then hesitated. "Janni?" he whispered.
The body that contained the demon and Janni and whatever remained of Nikodemos writhed and pulled its lips back into a skull-like grin.
"The globe, Riddler. Abarsis. The globe. Break the globe!"
Its fingers splayed backwards, seeming to have no bone within them; its neck snapped from side to side with force enough to make the wooden slats jump. Tempus rushed to weave his hands through Niko's slate-gray hair, cushioning the other-world tortures with his own flesh.
"Do something for him!" he bellowed as the spasms rocked Niko's body and blood began to seep from his nose and lips.
"Do something for him!"
The demon's mocking echo erupted from somewhere in Niko's gut. Sparks sizzled along Tempus's forearm, paralyzing him. Niko's arms, no longer trembling, strained purposefully against the leather straps.
"It's going to transfer!" Randal screamed, leaping up from his chair. He gestured with bum-twisted fingers. His will called forth fire but his ruined flesh could not support it. Groaning, he sank to his knees.