The bay horse shied up then, screamed and shied as the dog jumped at its throat, and Strat felt-
-nothing under him. Simply nothing stopping him from flying through the air and landing dazed on the cobbles.
He scrabbled for his knees, bad shoulder stunned, knee and hip paralyzed-he fell on his face again, somewhere between pain and numbness, and stopped caring whether he lived or died-because the horse was gone, and all there was in the world was Randal sitting on the filthy cobbles beside him, saying to someone-"I sent it away. I don't know if I should have done that-"
And Crit's voice saying; "You damn fool!"
As someone gathered him off the pavement and cradled his head in his lap-someone familiar, over a lot of years, someone who kept saying, "Ace, gods, I'm sorry."
The horse was gone-turned to air beneath him. It was the last gift she had given him. And it was gone. His friends took it from him. Or she did. There was only the taste of blood in his mouth.
She did not know why she did what she did-it was only the night, and the feeling of change in the wind, and the feeling of things slipping away from her. She murmured, though perhaps none of her folk could hear her, "Protection for my own is all I can do now. But that I do, as best I can."
She wanted her own with her tonight. Behind her closed lids she saw the dying of altar fires, she heard the stirring of gods in their shrines-she gathered her forces on this night and she wove spells to protect this place, such as she could-
Against all wisdom to the contrary-she drew her servants around her, revised the lines of her power-drew them from all over the city to protect them on this night: she felt Haught's battering at tlie wards that held him, felt the pleas he flung at her, like a moth battering at the glass-
But one face she saw more than all the rest, one touch she wanted most, and, dyed by a thousand murders and a thousand more black sins, she tried to stop thinking about him, telling herself no, let him go, stop the anger, stop the wanting-
He could be in Hell itself and she could draw him to her: pyromant, necromant, she could still raise the dead-singly and with effort, who once had summoned legions out of Hell's long patrol and set them to march against her rival-
She had lost a great deal-she had blown a great deal of her power away on the winds, had seen the dust of a shattered Globe of Power settle like a dream over Sanctuary, making mages of beggars and diminishing the power of the mage-born irrevocably: if that were not so she could lift her hand, raise the lightnings, change the wind-take the failing Empire, make herself that power that would shake the world.
As it was, the Empire would fail and fall, the greatness would slip away from Ranke, and the marbles crumble and the decline, centuries long, bring new powers, new mages, new wizardry-
She was done with dreams of power. She let Ranke enter its long, long slide to destruction, she listened to the rising of the wind, the echo of that wind in empty fanes and altars, she said softly, ever so softly,
"Goodbye, Strat."
Knowing they would not meet again, even in Hell-her curse being immortality.
"Damn you!" Strat said, when they had gotten him onto his feet. But Crit held him there, in the cold, dusty light of dawn, a stinging wind skirling through the streets of Sanctuary, Crit had his arms about him, held him like a brother.
There was no sign of the bay horse. He ached from head to foot. His knee and his elbow were bleeding, and would stiffen.
"Get up on my horse," Crit said then. "We'll get you another."
He looked from one to the other of them in this beginning of dawnCrit and Randal,'and it was strange, as if having lost everything he had, he could feel so free-
So damnably nothing-left-to-lose-except Crit, standing there holding him on his feet, Randal supporting him from the other side.
He let them help him to the saddle, he let Crit and Randal lead him through the first stir of morning in the streets. He listened to Crit telling him how Shepherd had told him where he had to search, he listened to Randal saying there was something strange in this wind ...
Shepherd met them at the turning. Shepherd said-leaning on the saddlebow of the big mud-colored horse, and looking straight at them, "Our service is done. Time we were moving on."
A gust of wind rocked at them. A flash of light hit their faces. Crit's horse shied and stood with its ears back, Crit and Randal holding it while Strat held on-and whatever had been Shepherd became a burst of light, a grim figure on a dark horse; a rising whirlwind, and a boy's voice saying,
"Follow the Shepherd... ."
"Abarsis ..." Strat had no idea which of them had said it, or whether his eyes really remembered the figure in the light.
Follow the Shepherd. ...
Time we were moving on ...
Winds out of the desert battered at Sanctuary's shutters, swirled stinging clouds of sand and dust against a brazen sun.
Something fled shrieking on that wind, unbound-a witch's disembodied soul skirled three times about the towers of the Lancothis house, skimmed forlornly along the river and flew-formless and lost-before the gale.
So Haught reported, arriving wind-scoured and dusty at the riverhouse that day. It was a much-chastened Haught who kissed the hem of Ischade's black robe and begged shelter from this wind.
Ischade considered this contrition. "Don't trust him," Stilcho said coldly, Stilcho being at least the most privileged of her servants, and Haught's logical rival.
"I don't," she said plainly, and picked up her cloak and put it on. "Stay here," she said. "You'll be safe, at least, whatever happens... ."
She left then, took to the winds herself, and lighted in raven-shape by the city gate, where a sullen, closely wrapped crowd had gathered-a crowd through which she moved as a black-cloaked woman, willing no one to see her, or if they saw-to forget that they had seen; that gift she still had undiminished.
She came on the rumor Haught had brought-was there to see the last of the Rankene forces ride through the streets, out the gates.
They were very few-amazingly few, the crowd murmured, wondering if there were not more to come.
A handful of meres; the few remaining of the 3rd Commando; and last to leave, the Stepsons, Randal the mage; Critias ... with Strat beside him, on a tall dun horse, no banners, no haste. Strat did not even turn his head as he rode past, near enough she could have touched him.
The riders passed the gates, in blowing dust so thick it made shadows of them, made them nothing more than ghosts in the golden light.
For a moment the crowd began to drift-but one left the gate, one went out leading a mule, quickly lost in the dust. Some said it was another mere; some said it was one of the rebels-looking for revenge, perhaps, Sanctuary's last violence aimed at Ranke.
Ischade knew that boy-almost-man-a scoundrel named Zip, or some such, servant of a god inimical to her: she felt that presence strongly when he passed, before the crowd began to disperse.
After that was just the dust, just the ghosts of buildings in what should have been bright day, the hill lost in haze and dust, yellow sand skirling along the streets.
Roxane was gone, to heaven or to hell or whatever demon wanted her. The gods of Ranke deserted their shrines. Sanctuary was falling away from the Empire, the forces that had sustained Ranke were leaving and she might have followed them-but could not, not as far as they went, and not where the god might lead them. She was always a creature of the shadows, and of candlelight, and needed lives to sustain her life-
Except his.
She cherished that one claim to virtue.
THE FIRE IN A GOD'S EYE by Robin Wayne Bailey
The shallow waters of the White Foal glimmered blackly in the late night, purling with a suspiciously sweet rush and gurgle over its stony bottom. It whisper-whispered, as if it ferried secrets; deepening, as it went south between its inauspicious banks toward Sanctuary and Downwind and beyond to the sea. Sharp as a razor's cut was the line where the water touched the land at the fording point between Apple Lane and the Generals' Road, but looking far up or down its course there was no telling the river from the sky. For all that a fanciful mind could guess, it might have flowed down from a source somewhere in the dark heavens to touch the earth only briefly, here at the end of the world, before it plummeted over the edge and on, to the underworld. This river, with all the detritus that it carried, with all the dead who had washed up on its shores, with all the souls who had given themselves in despair to its waves, this river would make such a fitting link.