And the smell of heated horse: Two were stamping, reins tied to Ischade's gate, and one of those was Grit's big black. She recognized it by the star and snip as it turned its head to whicker softly to the mount she rode.
The mare under her gave a belly-shaking acknowledgment and she realized that the horse she rode, and his, were lovers.
Hating herself for resenting even that, for her confusion and her doubts, she dismounted, trying not to think at all.
And walked up to the vampire-woman's gate, and pushed it with a sweaty palm.
Perhaps she was meeting her doom here-Ischade had no reason to cut Kama the kind of slack she allowed Straton, and Crit because of their pairbond, and Kama's father because of some bargain whose specifics Tempus had never revealed.
If Crit was in there, Kama wanted to see him. She focused on that and nothing else.
Love sucks, she told herself, and wondered what he'd say.
She'd knocked upon Ischade's door, which was lit somehow, though no torch gleamed or candle flickered in its lamp, before she'd thought of an excuse to give. She could always say she needed to debrief.
If he was there. If it wasn't a trap. If the necromant wasn't into women this summer.
Then the door opened and a small and dusky figure stepped out, closing it behind her so that Kama was forced to retreat a pace, then take a step down the stoop's stairs.
That put them eye to eye and the eyes of Ischade were deeper than Kama's hidden grief for a child lost long ago on the battlefield and the man who'd refused to give her another chance.
"Yes?" said the velvet-voiced woman who held Strat in thrall.
Kama, who was more woman than she'd have chosen, looked deep into the eyes of the woman who was all any man who'd seen her had ever dreamed of wanting, and felt rough, unkempt, foolish.
"Crit's horse... is it... ? Is he... ?"
"Here? The both. Kama, isn't it?" Ischade's dark eyes delved, narrowed just a fraction, then widened.
"It, I-I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry. I'll just go and..."
"There's no harm. And no peace, either," said the vampire-woman who seemed suddenly sad. "Not if your father has the say of it. You want him-Crit? Take care for what you want, little one."
And Kama, who had never known her mother and thought of other women as if she herself were a man, found her arms outstretched to Ischade for comfort, weeping freely, sobbing so deeply that nothing she tried to say came out in words.
But the necromant drew back with a hiss and a warding motion, a shake of her head and a blink that broke some spell or other.
Then she turned and was gone inside, though Kama hadn't seen the door open to admit her.
Suddenly alone with her tears on the doorstep of one of the most feared powers in Sanctuary, Kama heard words within- low words, some spoken by men.
Before the door could reopen, before Crit could see her weeping like a baby, she had to get out of here. She didn't mean it; she shouldn't have come. She needed nobody-not her father, not his fighters, not Zip or Torchholder and, most especially, not the Sacred Bander called Crit.
She'd run down the path and thrown herself up on her saddle before the door opened again.
Anything the man in the doorway might have shouted was drowned out by the mare's thundering hooves as Kama slapped her unmercifully with the reins, headed toward the Stepsons' barracks at a dead run.
There was nothing Crit could tell her that she wanted to hear-except perhaps why she could forgive Zip, who had betrayed her and tried to pin Strat's attempted murder on her, when she couldn't forgive Crit, who had wanted to marry her and have a child with her.
Tasfalen's uptown estate had once been luxurious and fine, the centerpiece of one of Sanctuary's most exclusive neighborhoods.
Now it stood alone, blackened and charred but whole, while all around it skeletal remains of burned-out homes teetered for blocks, frameworks leaning on lumps of fused brick, so that occasionally a charcoaled timber snapped of its own weight and came crashing down to break an eerie silence that spread from here to the uptown house where the pillar of fire had once raged, and beyond.
Not even rats ran these streets at night, since the pillar of flame had cleansed an uptown house and all the witchery that once had centered in its velvet-hung bedroom.
But Tempus had called a meeting here, across the street from Tasfalen's front door, in the dead of night-a meeting of those concerned, once all his preparations had been made.
The sleepless veteran was the only one unaffected by the hours he and his had kept this week in Sanctuary.
Crit, who'd born the brunt of delegated tasks, weaved on his feet with exhaustion as he set torches in the rubble of the house across from Tasfalen's; had the light been better, the black circles under his eyes would have told a clearer tale of what he'd been through and what it cost him to petition Is-chade for leave to do what tonight must be done here.
Strat, Crit's partner, worked silently beside him, unloading ox thighs rich with fat from a snorting chestnut who didn't like its burden, and oil in child-sized stoneware rhytons, and placing all on a makeshift plinth exactly opposite Tasfalen's door.
Tempus watched his Stepsons work without a word, waiting for the witch to show. Ischade had decreed this meeting be at midnight-necromants will be necromants. She was crucial to this undertaking, so Randal said.
Tempus hardly cared; the god was in him fierce and strong, making everything seem fire-limned and slow: his task force leader; the witch-ridden Stepson, Strat; the horses bearing sacrificial burdens. If he hadn't remembered that he'd thought it mattered, that he'd felt need to leave here owing nothing, he'd have left this stone unturned.
But Ischade owed him this favor-if it really was one. And he, in turn, owed a debt he was loath to carry-a debt to the Nisibisi witch last seen behind that ward-locked door across the street.
Tasfalen's door. It had not opened since the pillar of flame had scoured the neighborhood about it. What might come out of there, not even Ischade was certain. Powers had convened to cleanse the ground here, but stopped just short of the house. Powers that no one thought would ever work together had taken a hand to bar that door-Ischade's sort of powers, and others from deeper hells; Stormbringer's primal fury, and thus those from the sort of heaven Jihan's father ruled.
Or thus, at any rate, Tempus understood it. The god in him understood something different-something of passion inbound and lust unreleased.
There was a something in there all right, the god was telling him: something very hungry and very angry.
Whatever it was-Nisibisi witch, a ravening ghost thereof, a demon entrapped, a shard of Nisi power globe-it hadn't survived in there since winter's end on stored foodstuffs and the occasional mouse.
If it was Roxane, behind Ischade's iron wards that not even the rip in magic's fabric could weaken, then the Unbinding would have to be carefully done. If it was Something Else, Tempus was prepared to give it battle-he'd once fought Jihan's own storm-cold father to a draw over matters he had less stake in.
Snapper Jo scuttled up to the Tros horse by which Tempus stood, the fiend's knuckles nearly dragging on the ground, its snaggle teeth gleaming in the torchlight: "Sire," it grunted, "see her? Snapper can't tell." The fiend, in its distress, ramped like a bear-side to side, side to side. "Mistress won't like, won't like ... Snapper go now?"
"Did you place the stone. Snapper?" The stone'in question was a bluish gem, crazed and fractured, Ischade had given Crit. For what payment, when the stone would help release her enemy and perhaps release Straton, too, for duty to the east, Tempus hadn't asked.