But Haught knew none of these things. He was drawn. He felt the exercise of magics like a tremor in the foundations, a quivering in his bones. He felt the power coming from that ruin across the street, where most of an entire block of Sanctuary's finest houses had mingled all in one charcoaled wreckage of tumbled brick and stone and timbers; and he felt it rush elsewhere, tantalizing and horrific and soul-threatening. He bent down to peer through the vents of that window, careful to shroud himself, which was his chiefest Talent, to go invisible to mages and other Talents. To that, his magic had descended. He spied on the working of magic that he could not presently command. He longed after power and he longed after his freedom, neither one of which he dared try to take.
He saw the coming together of his enemies out there in the dark, saw looks directed toward the house, and felt the straining of spells which the witch Ischade had woven about his prison. He shivered, as he stood there and inhaled that wind redolent of old burning and present sorceries and exorcisms, of revenge; he suddenly knew this house the target of all these preparations, and he felt an overwhelming terror: and trembled with his hatred. He felt the power build, and the wards flare with a moment's dissolution-
And he was paralyzed, frozen with doubt of himself, even while that dreadful force came all about the house and burst the wards in a great flare of light.
He screamed.
Elsewhere the sleeper started upright, and convulsed, and smoked from head to foot, which smoke streamed in a flash toward the hall, and the chimney, and aloft, in a moment that all living flesh in the house was battered with light and sound and pain.
The sleeper fell back again, slack-limbed; Haught collapsed by the window in the front room, and by the time he was conscious enough to lift himself on his arms and assess the damage, all the air seemed still and numb, his hearing blasted by a sound which never might have been sound at all.
He gathered himself up and clung to the sill, and lifted himself further, trembling. He stood there in that condition till it was all quiet again, stood there till the shadowed figures went their way from the ruin across the street, and he dared finally move the window and shut it again.
A hand descended on his shoulder and he whirled and let out a scream that made it very fortunate that the party across the street had dispersed.
The calm, handsome face that stared so closely into his- smiled. It was not the smile of the man who had owned the body. It was not that of the witch who lived there now. Nothing sane was at home within that shell. Haught was a mage, still. Against another threat he might fling out some power, even with the crippling of magic throughout the town; he was still formidable.
But what slept behind those eyes, what wandered there sometimes sane and sometimes not, and sometimes one mind and sometimes another... was death. It had reasons, if it remembered them, to take a slow revenge; and to hurl magic against the wards (he felt them restored) which held that soul in-
Haught prayed to his distant gods and cringed against the shutters, made an unwanted rattle and flinched again. Ischade had been there. Ischade had been near enough long enough that perhaps this thing that looked like Tasfalen would pick that up; and remember its intentions again in some rage to blast wards and souls at once.
But the revenant merely lifted a hand and touched his face, lover's gesture. "Dust," it said, which was its only word; daily Haught swept up the dust which infiltrated the house, and sifted it for the dust of magics which might linger in it, the remnant of the Globe of Power; with that dust he made a potion, and dutifully he infused it into this creature, stealing only a little for himself. He was faithful in this. He feared not to be. He feared a great deal in these long months, did Haught, once and for a few not-forgotten moments, the master mage of Sanctuary; he suspected consequences which paralyzed him in doubt. Because he had choices he dared none of them: his fear went that deep. It was his particular hell. "It's all right," he said now. "Go back to bed. Go to sleep." As if he spoke to some child.
"Pretty," it said. But it was not a child's voice, or a child's touch. It had found a new word. He shuddered and sought a way quietly to leave, to slip aside till it should sleep again. It had him trapped. "Pretty." The voice was clear, as if some deeper timbre had been there and now was lost. As if part of the madness had dispersed. But not all.
He dared do nothing at all. Not to scream and not to run and not to do anything which might make it recall who it was. He could read minds, and he kept himself from this one with every barrier he could hold. What happened behind those eyes he did not want to know.
"Here," he said, and tried to draw the arm down and lead it back to bed and rest. But it had as well be stone; and all hell was in that low and vocally masculine laugh.
The slow hooffalls echoed in the alleyway, off the narrow walls; and another woman, overtaken alone in this black gut of Sanctuary's dark streets, might have thought of finding some refuge. Ischade merely turned, aware that some night rider had turned his horse down the alley, that he still came on, slowly, provoking nothing.
In fact, being what she was, she knew who he was before she ever turned her face toward him; and while another woman, knowing the same, might have run in search of some doorway, any doorway or nook or place to hide or fight, Ischade drew a quiet breath, wrapped her arms and her black robes about her, and regarded him in lazy curiosity.
"Are you following me?" she asked of Tempus.
The Tr6s's hooves rang to a leisurely halt on the cobbles, slow and patterned echo off the brick walls and the cobbles. A rat went skittering through a patch of moonlight, vanished into a crack in an old warehouse door frame. The rider towered in shadow. "Not a good neighborhood for walking."
She smiled and it was like most of her smiles, like most of her amusements, feral and dark. She laughed. There was dark in that too: and a little pang of regret. "Gallantry."
"Practicality. An arrow-"
"You didn't take me unaware." She rarely said as much. She was not wont to justify herself, or to communicate at all; she found herself doing it to this man, and was distantly amazed. She felt so little that was acute. The other feeling was simply awareness, a web the quiverings of which were always there. But perhaps he did know that, or suspect it. Perhaps that was why she answered him, that she suspected a deeper question in that comment than most knew how to ask. He was shadow to her. She was shadow to him. They had no identity and every identity in Sanctuary, city of midnight meetings and constant struggle, constant connivance.
"I heal," he said, low and in a voice that went to the bones. "That's my curse."
"I don't need to," she said in the same low murmur. "That's mine."
He said nothing for a moment. Perhaps he thought about it. Then: "I said that we would try them... yours and mine."
She shivered. This was a man who walked through battlefields and blood, who was storm and gray to her utmost black and stillness; this was a man always surrounded by men, and cursed with too much love and too many wounds. And she had none of that. He was conflict personified, the light and the dark; and she settled so quickly back to stasis and cold, solitary.