'We're never out,' Haught said, remembering the beggars, the ragged shapes rising out of the shadows like spiders from their webs, small moving humps in the lightning-flash that might have showed their faces to these beggar witnesses.
The chill had seeped inward from Haught's wet clothes. He felt cold, beyond shivering. He sneezed, wiped his nose on his sleeve, went over to the fire to sit disconsolate. Quietly he tried a small scrying, to see something. Once he had had the means, but it had left him, with his luck; with his freedom. 'I'll go out tomorrow,' Moria said, walking over near the fire. 'Don't,' said Haught. There was a small premonition on him. It might be the scrying. It might be nothing, but he felt a deep unease, the same panic that he had felt seeing the beggars moving through the dark. 'Don't let him talk you into it. It's not safe. We've got enough for a little while. Let him find us, this Jubal.'
'I'll find him,' she said. 'I'll get money.' But she said that often. She went and picked up the cup again, wiped the spilled wine with a rag. Sniffed loudly. Haught turned his back to her, staring at the fire, the leaping shapes. The heat burned, almost to the point of pain, but it took that, to reach the cold inside his bones, in his marrow; easier to watch the future than to dwell on the past, to remember Wizardwall, or Carronne, or slavery.
This Jubal the slaver who was their hope had sold him once. But he chose to forget that too. He had nerved himself to walk the streets, at least by dark, to look free men in the eye, to do a hundred things any free man took for granted. Mradhon Vis gave him that; Moria did. If they looked to Jubal, so must he. But in the fire he saw things, twisted shapes in the coals. A face started back at him, and its eyes -
Mradhon came over and dumped the boots by him, spread his clothes on the stones, himself wrapped in a blanket. 'What do you learn?' Mradhon asked. He shrugged. 'I'm blind to the future. You know that.' A hand came down on his shoulder, pressed it, in the way of an apology.
'You shouldn't talk to her that way,' Haught said again.
The hand pressed his shoulder a second time. He shivered, despite the heat.
'Scared?' Mradhon said. Haught took it for challenge, and the cold stayed in his heart. Scared he was. He had not had a friend, but Mradhon Vis. Distrust gnawed at him, not bitter, but only the habit of weighing his value - to anyone. He had learned that he was for using and when he stopped being useful he could not see what there was in him that anyone would want. Moria needed him; no woman ever had, not really. This man did, sometimes; for a while; but a shout from him - a harsh word - made him flinch, and reminded him what he was even when he had a paper that said otherwise. Challenged, he might fight from fear. Nothing else. And never Mradhon Vis.
'I talk to her like that,' Mradhon said, not whispering, 'when it does her good. Brooding over that brother others -'
'Shut up,' Moria said from behind them.
'Mor-am's dead,' Mradhon said. 'Or good as dead. Forget your brother, hear? It's your good I'm thinking of.'
'My good.' Came a soft, hateful laugh. 'So I can steal again, that's the thing. Because Jubal knows me, not you.' A chair scraped. Haught looked round as two slim-booted feet came beside them, as Moria squatted down and put a hand on Mradhon's arm. 'You hate me. Hate me, don't you? Hate women. Who did that, Vis? You born that way?'
'Don't,' Haught said, to both of them. He gripped Mradhon's arm, which had gone to iron. 'Moria, let him be.'
'No,' Mradhon said. And for some reason Moria drew back her hand and had a sobered look. .
'Go to bed,' said Haught. 'Now.' He-sensed the violence beside him, sensed it worse than other times. He could calm this violence, draw it to himself, if there was nothing else to do. He was not afraid of that, viewed it with fatalistic patience. But Moria was so small, and Mradhon's hate so much.
She lingered, looking at them both. 'You come,' she said, in a quiet, fearful voice, 'too.'
Mradhon said nothing, but stared into the fire. Go, Haught shaped with his lips, nodded towards the bed, and so Moria went, paused by the table, and finished off the wine all at a draught. -
'Sot,' Mradhon said under his breath.
'She just gets started at it sometimes,' Haught said. 'Alone - the storm...'
The rain spatted against the door. The wind knocked something over that went skittering along the alley outside. The door rattled. Twice. And ceased.
Mradhon Vis looked that way, long and keenly. Sweat ran on his brow.
'It's just the wind,' Haught said.
Thunder cracked, distantly, outside, and the shingles of the small riverhouse fluttered like living things. The gate creaked, not the wind, and disturbed a warding-spell that quivered like a strand of spider web, while the spider within that lair stirred in a silken bed, opened eyes, stretched languorous limbs.
The visitor took time getting to the door: she read his hesitancy, his fear, in the sound of uneven steps her hearing registered. No natural hearing could have pierced the rain sound. She slipped on a robe, an inkiness in the dark. She wished for light, and there was, in the fireplace, atop the logs that were nothing but focus and never were consumed; atop candles that smelled musty and strange and perfumed with something sweet and dreadful.
Her pulse quickened as the visitor tried the latch. She relaxed the ward that sealed the door, and it swung inward, a gust that guttered the candles, amid that gust a cloaked, hunched man who smelled of fear. She tightened the ward again and the door closed, against the wind, with a thump that made the visitor turn, startled, in his
tracks.
He did not try it. He looked back again, cast the hood back from a face fire had touched. His eyes were dilated, wild.
'Why do you come?' she asked, intrigued, despite a life that had long since lacked variety. In the casual matter of the door she had dropped pretences that she wore like robes; he knew, must know, that he was in deadly jeopardy. 'Who sent you?' He seemed the sort not to plan, but to do what others planned.
'I'm one of the h-hawkm-masks. M-mor-am.' The face jerked, twisting the mouth; the whole head nodded with the effort of speech. 'M-message.' He fumbled out a paper and offered it to her in a shaking hand.
'So.' He was not so unhandsome, viewed from the right side. She walked around him, to that view, but he followed her with his eyes, and that was error, to meet her stare for stare. She smiled at him, being in that mood. Mor-am. The name nudged memory, and wakened interest. Mor-am. The underground pricked up its ears in interest at that name - could this man be running Jubal's errands again? Likely as summer frost. She tilted her head and considered him, this wreckage.' Whose message?' she asked.
'T-take it.' The paper fluttered in his hand.
She took it, felt of it. 'What does it say?' she asked, never taking her eyes from his.
'The Stepsons - t-there's another d-dead. They s-sent me.'
'Did they?'
'C-common problem. M-Moruth. The beggars. They're k-killing us both.'
'Stepsons,' she said. 'Do you know my name, Mor-am? It's Ischade.' She kept walking, saw the panic grow. 'Have you heard that name before?'
A violent shake of the head, a clamping of the jaw.
'But you are more notorious than I-in certain quarters. Jubal misses you. And you carry Stepson messages - what do they say to tell me?'