"You missed your appointment," she said. "But I never wait. And I don't hold you to any agreement. That's what I would have told you then. What I did, I did. For my reasons. Wisest if we don't mix."
And she turned and walked away from him. But the Tr6s started forward as if stung, and Tempus, shadowlike, circled to cut her off.
Another woman might have recoiled. She stood quite still. Perhaps he thought she could be bluffed, perhaps it was part of a dark game; but in his silence, she read another truth.
It was the challenge. It was the unsatisfiable woman. The man who (like too many others) partly feared her, feared failure, feared rejection; and whose godhood was put in question by her very existence.
"I see," she said finally. "It isn't your men you're buying."
There was deathly silence then. The horse snorted explosively, shifted. But he did not lose his control, or lose control over the beast. He sat there in containment of it and his own nature, and even of his wounded honesty.
Offended, he was less storm and more man, a decent man whose self-respect was in pawn: whose thought now was indeed for the lives and the souls he had proposed himself to buy. He was two men; or man and something much less reasonable.
"I'll see you home," he said, like some spurned swain to the miller's daughter. With, at the moment, that same note of martyred finality and renouncement. But it would not last at the gate. She did not see the future, but she knew men, and she knew that it was for his own sake that he said that, and offered that, in his eternal private warfare-with the storm. Man of grays and halftones. He tormented himself because it was the only way to win.
She understood such a battle. She fought it within her own chill dark, more pragmatically. She staved things off only daily, knowing that the next day she would not win against her appetites; but the third she would be in control again; so she lived by tides and the rhythms of the moon, and knowing these things she kept herself from destructive temptations. This man served a harsher, more chaotic force that had no regular ebb and flow; this man warred because he had no peace, and no moment when he was not at risk.
"No," she said, "I'll find my own way tonight. Tomorrow night. Come tomorrow."
She waited. In his precarious balance, in his battle, she named him a test of that balance and she knew even the direction his soul was sliding.
He fought it back. She had not known whether he could, but she had been sure that he would try. She knew the silent anger in him, one half against the other, and both suspecting some despite. But there was the debt he owed her. He backed the Tros and she walked on her way down the alley unattended.
Another woman might have suffered a quickening of the pulse, a weakness in the knees, knowing who and what eyes were staring anger at her back. But she knew equally well what he was going to do, which was to sit the Tr6s quite still until she had passed beyond sight. And that he would wait only to prove that he could wait, when the assaults would come on his integrity, not knowing any tide at all.
He touched her, in a vague and theoretical way. She respected him. She took a monumental chance in what he proposed for payment, not knowing whether either of them might survive it. Perhaps he knew the danger and perhaps not. For herself, she felt only the dimmest of alarms. It was the dreadful ennui again, the sense of tides.
The fact was that she missed Roxane. She missed her own household of traitors. She missed them with the feeling of a body totally enervated, the ancient ennui the worse to bear because for a little while, so long as there had been an enemy and a challenge, she had been alive, for a little while she had been stirred out of a still and waking sleep.
Only her lovers could touch her when the ennui was heaviest. It was not the sex for which she killed. It was the moment of anguish, of terror, of power or of fear or sorrow-it never mattered which. It never lasted long enough even to identify. There was only the instant that had to be tried again and again, to try to know what it was.
Perhaps (sometimes she wondered) it was the only moment she was alive.
The Tros horse thundered from the alley, the rider never looking back; and Straton, Stepson, pressed himself flat against the streetward wall, staring after Tempus until horse and rider merged with the night.
And turned abruptly and looked down the dark and empty alleyway, knowing that Ischade would have gone.
That she would blast him to hell for spying on her business.
He heard rumors of her-heard!-gods, he had heard a thousand whispers without hearing them, not truly. Then- then he had taken a bad one, then he had spent long enough in hell to shake any man from his confidence in himself, in his choices, in the fool gesture that had sent him blind angry onto a street without his cautions or his wits. Now for the rest of his life there might be the small twinges of pain, all unexpected, that shot through his shoulder when he moved his arm at the wrong angle, an unpredictable pain that enraged him when it would come shooting through and he would stop in a certain reach, at an angle. It came so quickly and so indefinably that he could not feel whether it was the pain of scarred tendons and joint running up against their limit and freezing dead, or whether it was only the pain that froze the arm, in an eyeblink of flinching that he was not man enough to master. He tried with exercise and with dogged resistance when it did freeze; but still it betrayed him at bad moments.
It was his confidence that had died in that street, before Haught had ever gotten his hands on him. It was the shattering of a body he had always taken businesslike care of, and treated well, and gotten hale and whole to this end of his life when he had begun to look on shopkeepers and merchants and their wives and their brats with a kind of forlorn envy; mere service was a young man's game and he had begun to think of another kind of life, still with his body and his wits intact, still with his resources and his experience and his contacts-
Until a single careless act wrecked him and flung him down on a curbside under the eyes of all of Sanctuary; left a flinch in his shield arm and a knotted fear in his gut-not the nightmares that waked him sweating, not that fear. It was the suspicion that he had deserved it, and that Crit was right: His whole world was a construction of cobwebs and moonbeams.
The woman whose face he saw in the act of love, the beautiful, dusky face, the black hair scattered in silk webs across the pillows-the face that mused and smiled her thoughtful smile above him in the soft light of a fire and candles-
-he could not equate with the one who walked the alleys. With the one who took lover after lover in the most sordid byways of Sanctuary, indiscriminate-killer.
He followed her the way he drove at the arm, to find the limits of the pain and to control it, to exorcise it-like the other evil. He had seen things he could not forget. He had leaned toward sanity, toward Crit, and leaving her when the Stepsons rode out from this town; he would not look back; he would dream about it less and less. The arm would heal and he would recover himself somewhere, some year.
But this betrayal he had not imagined, this... double ... betrayal, her with his commander.
Damn them both. Damn them. He thought that he had felt all there was to feel. He had not put together until then, that he had been a real power in Sanctuary even before she had taken him to her bed. That she had made him almost a great one. But that was changed. He was useless to her, at a critical time. So she threw out her nets and gathered in one more apt for her purposes.