Then it pawed the ground and whickered, still fixing him with a fire-light centered gaze from liquid horse eyes.
The come-hither look and the forefoot pawing the ground were unmistakable to any horseman: the bay wanted Crit to hurry up, climb aboard: it wanted to go for a ride.
"Oh no, horse," he said out loud to it. "I came by myself- no reinforcements, no backup. I did that because nobody else ought to risk his life-or sacrifice it, if that's what's going to happen here... because this is a matter between pairbonded partners."
The horse snorted disapprovingly, as if to remind Crit that it knew he was trying to cover his own fear. Then it slowly turned around, so that its rump was no longer facing him, and ambled toward him.
The big, liquid, obling-centered eyes said: Strut is mine, too; horses and men are partners; mount up and let's stop playing games. He's waiting.
"Strat, damn you to hell," Crit whispered, shaking his head to clear it of horse-thoughts and horse-needs and horse-loyalties. This wasn't even a living horse, just a ghost, something Ischade had conjured from a dead animal.
But the thing kept coming, head high, feet carefully placed to avoid stepping on its dangling bridle reins.
Bridle reins? Had they been there before? He didn't think so.
The horse, now an arm's-length away, stopped still. It whickered softly and the whicker said, / love him too. The forefoot, pawing the ground impatiently, added. We don't have much time. And then the horse, in the manner of high-school horses like Tempus's Tros, bent one foreleg at the knee, curling it and lowering his forequarters, the other front leg outstretched, while it arched its neck in a bow meant to enable a wounded man or a high-bom lady to mount up without difficulty.
"Crap, all right," Crit said through clenched teeth and strode resolutely toward the bowing ghost-horse, trying hard not to think too much about what he was doing, or whether he might be imagining the whole thing-maybe a piece of timber had fallen on him, a piece of masonry collapsed so fast he hadn't had time to realize it, and he was dead too, dead but denied a peaceful rest, trapped in some netherworld with the ghost-horse, on which he'd wander forever, seeking his lost rightside partner.
But no: The sky was full of lightning, there were shouts and mutters on the breeze from somewhere near by where factions fought. There was a plague in Sanctuary, all right, but not some spurious one that turned your lips blue and made your armpits sore: it was a plague of human failing, of confusion, of greed and desire and endless power plays.
It wasn't, he admitted as he mounted the bay (which felt surprisingly substantial, for a ghost-horse), the magic or the gods which made Sanctuary such a foul pit, but human excess; magic was no more to blame than sword or spear or rock. There were enough rocks on the earth to eradicate the race; magic couldn't do a better job, only a more colorful one. But rock or spear or wand or Nisi globe didn't murder on their own, nor enslave-the weapon must be wielded; the true culprit was human greed and human will. And the killing never stopped- in the name of magic or the name of god or the name of honor or nationalism or progress or liberation, it was just killing.
And because it had always been so, and would always be so, Critias had come to the profession of arms himself: the only protection he could see was to be a perpetrator, not a victim.
That was why Strat had made him so angry when he'd become entangled with Ischade: Strat had become a victim, and Crit had a horror of helplessness. Even if Strat were just a lovesick fool, Crit still thought he'd been right when he had shot past his friend that night on the balcony-if it had served to bring Straton to his senses, then Crit wouldn't be here, pulling himself up into the sometimes-saddle of Strat's sort-of-corporeal bay, riding into he-didn't-know what for abstracts of honor and duty that weren't going to keep him alive if the steaming stable toward which the bay was ineluctably heading crashed down upon his head.
The stables weren't exactly ablaze, but they had corn magazines and straw and hay in them and sparks smoldered on the roof.
Crit reached forward to catch up the bay's reins, but the beast had had a mouth like iron in life and it was no better in afterlife.
He sawed on the reins to no avail, then quit trying in time to duck as the horse trotted determinedly through the open stable doors and headed for wide stairs which must lead to the stable's loft.
Crit shifted his weight, thinking to throw one leg over the saddle and check out the stable loft on foot, when the horse started climbing.
"Vashanka's balls," the task force leader swore, flattening himself to the horse's neck as it climbed a flight never meant for anything of its size and boards creaked and groaned. "Horse, you'd better be right."
It was: at the stair's head was a landing, and as the bay's bulk appeared there, a woman stifled a scream.
It was hard to accustom his eyes to the dark; the climb up the stairs had been too fast-everything was still milky green to Crit's fire-dazzled vision.
But Crit heard voices and slipped from the bay's back, his sword in hand.
Together, man and ghost-horse ventured into the dimness; horse's head snaked low, man's sword paralleling its questing muzzle.
"Dear gods, what's that smell?" Crit muttered to himself.
And someone answered: "Strat. Or me, Critias. Which smell do you mean?"
And the voice of Stilcho was familiar to Critias, who had once thought him the best of his kind of Stepson. Blinking, Crit strained to see the ruined visage of the undead soldier. Stilcho was one of Ischade's minions. He should have known the witch would still have her talons in Strat, one way or the other.
He was going to swing his sword up, cut the one-eyed, ghoulish head from Stilcho's torso and hope decapitation would provide the poor soul what rest Ischade had denied-not be cause he expected his poor quotidian blade to do the job against magic, but because he was a soldier and he could only do what he was trained to do, when his vision cleared enough to see that Stilcho's face was neither so ruined nor so hostile as it ought to be.
And a hand touched his right shoulder, squeezed, and rested there-Stilcho's hand, warm and with the pulse of mortal blood in it so strong Crit fancied he could feel it coursing.
"That's right," said Stilcho softly through a mouth hardly scarred, "I'm alive again. Don't ask-"
Crit's question, "How?" hung in the air until Stilcho volunteered, "It's just too complicated. Stepson. Ask about Strat, that's what you're here for... or at least that's what he's here for." Stilcho jerked a thumb toward the bay horse, head low, snuffling, taking slow, careful steps toward a shadow that might be a prostrate man with a woman crouched by his side.
"That's right, Stilcho-Strat. That's all I want. Not you or your witch woman." It was Ischade there, hulking over Strat- it must be. Ischade's ghost-man and ghost-horse, and the nec-romant herself, ringing Strat round with magic.
Crit considered seriously for the first time the possibility that he was going to die here. He didn't believe for a moment that Stilcho was "alive" in the way that Crit-or Strat, please gods-was alive.
He said to Stilcho, "That's him, then? He's alive, if he can't control his bowels. I'll just take him and be-"
A voice from the shadowed loft said, "Shit, Stilcho, he'll kill me," as a hand which was also Strat's reached up feebly to stroke the ghost-horse's questing muzzle and the horse started to bow down again, not realizing that Strat was too badly wounded to mount, no matter how easy the ghost-horse tried to make it.
Crit found that he was blinking back tears. Unreasonably, he wanted to sit down crosslegged where he was, let things take their course-even if it meant burning to death in this damned loft with a partner too sick to be moved but well enough to remember that Crit had shot at him.