"Who was here just now?" Haught asked; and Stilcho twisted away, wishing to go back from the river-edge. But the ex-slave, Ischade's Nisi apprentice-had more strength in his fine hands than seemed likely.
"Janni," Stilcho said. "It was Janni."
"That wants fixing," Haught said.
Time was that Stilcho would have spat on the man; when he was alive and Haught was no more than a slave. But Haught served Her now. And Haught had talent that Her talent fed; and the stripping of a soul from a body was likely a negligible thing for Haught these days. Stilcho felt the chill that came when Haught's substance passed between him and Ischade. "Don't-I tried to reason with him. I tried to tell him he's dead. He's not listening. His partner's in trouble."
"I know," Haught said. His hand was viselike on Stilcho's cloaked arm, numbing. "And you very much don't want to go after him, do you. Stepson?"
"He's-crazy."
Haught's eyes met his, deceptively gentle, woman-gentle. The fingers loosened. "Difficult times, Stepson. She has company and you wander the dark." The fingers wandered gently down his arm and took his bare hand. "You have such simple loyalties now. Like life. Like those who can hold you to it. Ask me-how you can help me?"
"How can I help you?" The words poured out without a thought of resistance. The same way they did for Ischade. It was only afterward that the shame got to him. After-ward when he had time to think; but that was not now, with Haught this close, death gaping and lapping below the drop from the garden fence.
"You can go to hell," Haught said.
It was not a curse. It was an order. "For her-" Stilcho said, lips stammering. "I go for her, that's all."
"Oh, it's in her service. Believe me."
2
Strat blinked in the sunlight and rode past the Blue line checkpoint in the morning-the bay's shod hooves ringing hollow on the cobbles beside the bridge. The misnamed White Foal flowed murkily by, with its scarce traffic on dark-brown water; a skiff or two; a scruffy little barge.
The scarred end-posts stood innocent in the sun. The reeking, rotten streets of Downwind on the other side lost their mystery by daylight and became the ugly thing they were. The poor shuffled about their eternal business of staying alive, whatever the business of the night. It was a peaceful day in Sanctuary and the other-side. The invisible lines still existed; but they weakened by day, descending to amiable formality, expecting no assault. The iron discipline of the gangs and the death squads gave way to pragmatic spot-searches, Ilsigi poor taking their little chances with the lines they could cross, beggars begging their usual territories. Death squads operated nightly; bodies turned up by daylight to impress the populace.
But a Stepson still rode through, down the invisible no-man's line of the riverside. Strat saw the blue graffiti on one wall; saw red on another, where rival gangs blazoned their claims at riverside.
He knew hate surrounded him. He felt it in the city, felt it when he rode up the daylit streets in Jubal's territory-toward the Black line where members of the Band and the 3rd Commando held their own, keeping the bridge and one long street open from the Stepson Yellow line in the west, through Red through Blue and into the Black of the Mageguild's territory, commerce maintained against every attempt of the individual militias and factions to shut it down. It was a demonstration Ranke was not yet done; and some wanted to demonstrate otherwise.
His eyes scanned the way that he rode, his skin absorbed the temperature of the glances that fell on him.
The mongrel crowds of Sanctuary were out by daylight. The workmen and the merchants-the few shops, graffiti scarred, marked with the Permissions of Jubal's gangs that ruled the sector-spread few goods. Merchants had few goods. Took few chances. Many doors stayed shut; shop-shutters were boarded over. Uptown did not see this danger-signal; there the shops hired more guards; there the rich doubled the locks on their doors. Walegrin of the Garrison knew: the meres the prince hired knew, and both prepared as best they could-to hold the other long street open, hill to harbor.
Straton lifted his eyes, blinking in the day. He let the horse carry him in that lassitude his mornings-after had; let his mind carry him in crazed thoughts that darted this way and that, through the streets, to the detail of a graffiti'd wall that informed him of some death squad active in the night-to the beggar on the curb that withdrew from his horse's skittish hooves. A cart of empty jars passed him. A handbarrow groaned past under a load of rags and junk. A sewer opening afflicted his nostrils with its sweet-ugly stench. And a blue sky shone down on Ranke's slow death.
He blinked again, looked uptown through the haze of morning-smokes from Sanctuary's thousand fires, up the winding of one of the long streets.
And it seemed there was a line drawn in the world, with fools on one side and the other of it, and himself one of the few who could see himself as a fool. The high shining fine houses where Ranke frittered away its last hours barriered themselves in vain against the tide that was about to come uptown. Walegrin could not hold forever. Neither could they, below.
Sanctuary, with its backside to the sea.
With its mongrel gods and its mongrel merchants and the last lost rim of secure land in the Empire. Nisibis would sweep down to the shores; and the Beysib up from the south like a rolling wave; and for an intelligent man who had soldiered all his life away for the fools who wore the gold and the purple-there was in the end, riot and murder and death by stoning in city streets.
Fool, he thought, hating Kadakithis for what he was not. And had a vision of dark eyes and felt the feathery touch of soft lips and the dizzying descent into dark.
He took up on the reins. Looked uphill with thoughts moiling in him: And snapped the reins and sent the bay clattering along the Maze, through increasingly tangled streets. Red PFLS graffiti sprawled across a wall, once, twice, obscuring the usual obscenity, Jubal's blue hawk splashed over that. The bay spumed broken pottery, sent a girl shrieking for the curb. A rock pelted back and rebounded off the cobbles. The young were always the rebels.
The uptown house echoed to soft steps and the closing of doors and Moria came downstairs, wrapped in her robe. She cursed the servants, let out a gutter oath, and stopped dead on the steps, staring wide-eyed at what had gotten in. She clutched the robe about her, wiped at a frowsy tangle of hair and blinked in the dim light. Ex-thief, ex-hawkmask, she knew the elegant shape standing in the polished foyer by the Caronnese vase: the elegant, cloaked man who looked up at her and smiled.
Her heart thudded. "Haught." She came pelting down off the steps and remembered all at the same time that she was no longer the street-wiry sylph, no longer the tough woman who knew the ways Haught did not; he was all elegance and she was she was still Moria of the streets, gone a little fat and altogether terrified.
"Moria." Haught's voice was cool, but a sexual roughness ran through it, and shivered on her nerves. She stopped in her dismay and he took her by the shoulders, in this fine house that was Ischade's, as they all were Ischade's. No one had let him in. He passed whatever doors he liked.
"My brother's missing," she said. "He's-gone."
"No," Haught said. "She knows where he is. Vis and I found him. He's doing a little job. Now you have to."
Her mouth began to tremble. First it was outright terror for Mor-am, for her brother, who was half-crazy and bound to Ischade as she was; and second it was for herself, because she knew that she was in a trap and there was no way out. Ischade gave them this fine house and came and collected little pieces of their souls whenever she wanted favors done.