He flung himself around the comer, down the walk, and flinched. It was the same street. It was the same blind rage. Reprise, replayed. The bay horse was waiting for him; it always waited, a mockery of faithfulness, her gift to him, that would never leave him. He left it stabled. In the mid of nights he heard its hoof-falls on the cobbles beneath his window. He heard it pacing, heard its breath, the shift of its body in his dreams. And there was this small patch on its rump which ... was not there. There was nothing of color about it. It was just a flaw, a place that, if one stared at this coin-sized spot, one imagined one saw no horse at all, but cobbles, or the wall beyond, or some shimmer behind which the truth might be visible. He began, in his loss of confidence, to find terror in its faithfulness and its persistence.
He went to it now and gathered up the trailing rein and put his left arm about its neck, again, his left, to see if it would hurt; and hugged and patted the sleek warm neck to see if it would turn with its teeth and prove itself some thing out of hell. There was pain now, a muddle of ache and anger in his chest and in his throat and behind his eyes, and he was a damned fool out on the street where a sniper had found him before.
"Strat."
He spun about, a rush of cold fear and then of outrage. "Damn you, what are you doing here?"
His partner Crit just stood there and looked at him a moment. He had left Crit down the block, down by the burned houses.
"How'd I get this close?" Crit asked him. "You don't know. That's what I'm doing here."
"I want to find the bastard that shot me," he said. "I want to find that out." There was a connection. Crit could put most things together. That was what Crit did in the world, add little pieces and make big patterns. Crit had made one that said he was a fool. That was the man Crit saw tonight. He wanted to show Crit another one. He wanted to show Crit the old Straton back again, and to take care of his business and seal up the pain and not let it interfere with his working any longer.
Take care of his business and finish it so that he could ride out of this murder-damned town when the Stepsons pulled out, and not go with the feeling that he was driven.
Go out of town under Tempus's order, riding in the same company, with his mouth shut and his business all done. That was all he wanted.
The bay horse nosed him in the ribs, lipped his hand with velvet, insistent in its devotion.
There was no relief, no breath of wind, through the slit of a window, which overlooked nothing but the narrowest of air shafts down to a barren court. Somewhere a baby cried. A rat squealed in some fatal moment, in the jaws of some other predator of Sanctuary nights. The loft just above rustled with wings, disturbance among the sleeping birds that cooed and bickered and scratched by twilight and now ought to have slept. Of a sudden they started, all at once, a great clap of wings and avian panic; and Stilcho flinched, standing naked at that window in the dark. Wings fluttered, battering at the narrow opening overhead that gave the panicked flock an escape; gray wings took to the night, day birds put to rout by something that hunted above. He shivered, hands clutching the sill; and looked back at the woman who lay sprawled, coverless on the ragged sweat-soaked sheet. A body did not so much sleep in this third floor hellhole as pass out; the air was fetid and stank of human waste and generations of unwashed inhabitants. It was as much resource as they had, he and Moria. He was alive, but barely. Moria had sold everything she had, and plied her old trade, which terrified him; they hanged thieves, even in Sanctuary, and Moria was out of practice. She stirred. "Stilcho," she murmured. "Stilcho."
"Go to sleep." If he came to her now she would feel the tension in him, and know his terror. But she got up, a creak of the rope-webbed underpinnings, and came up behind him, and pressed her sweaty, weary self against him, her arms about him. He shivered even so and felt those arms tense.
"Stilcho." There was fear in her voice now. "Stilcho, what's wrong?"
"A dream," he said. "A dream, that's all." He held her arms in place, cherished her sticky, miserable heat against him. Heat of life. Heat of passion when they had the strength. Both had returned to him, along with his life. Only the eye that Moruth had taken-kept seeing. He had fled Ischade, fled mages, fled the agencies that used him as their messenger to hell. He was alive again, but one of his eyes was dead; and one looked on the living, but the other-
A third shiver. He had seen into hell tonight,
"Stilcho."
He put his back to the window. It was hard to do, his naked shoulders vulnerable to the night air; and worse, his face turned to the room, with its deeper dark in which his living eye had no power. Then the dead one was most active, and what moved there suddenly took clearer shape.
"They've let something loose, oh gods, Moria, something's gotten loose in the town-"
"What, what thing?" Moria the thief gripped his arms in hands gone hard and shook him for the little she could move him. "Stilcho, don't, don't, don't!"
The baby squalled and shrieked, from the window down the shaft. The poor shared their violence and their tempers, lived in such indignities, the noise, the raised voices audible from apartment to apartment.
"Hush," he said, "it's all right." Which was a lie. His teeth wanted to chatter.
"We should go back to Her. We should-"
"No." He was adamant in that. If they both starved.
But sometimes in not-quite dreams, in that inner vision, he felt Ischade's touch, plainly as he had ever felt it, and suspected in profoundest unease that she knew precisely where her escaped servants were.
"We could have a house," Moria said, and burst into tears. "We could be safe from the law." She burrowed her head against him and hugged him tight. "I came from this. / can't live like this, it stinks, Stilcho, it stinks and I stink and I'm tired, I can't sleep-"
"No!" The vision was there again. Red eyes stared at him in the black. He tried to shift his sight away from it, but it was more and more real. He tried to push it away, and turned to the little starlight there was and clung to the sill till his fingers ached. "Light the lamp."
"We haven't-"
"Light the lamp!"
She left him; he heard her rattling and fussing with the tinderbox and the wick and tried to think of light, of any pure, yellow-golden-white light, of sun in mornings, of the burning summer sun, anything that had the power to dispel the dark.
But the sun he limned in his one living eye, there in the dark, reddened, and became paired, and lengthened, winking out in a blink as deep as hell and reappearing in slitted satisfaction.
The lamp glow began slowly, brightened, profligate waste. He turned and saw Moria's face underlit, haggard and sweaty and fear-haunted. For a moment she was a stranger, a presence he could no more account for than he could account for that vision which had waked him, of a thing launched into the skies over Sanctuary and hurtling free. But she moved the lamp and set it on the little niche shelf, and it made her body all shadows and flesh tones, her hair all wispy gold, all over. The magic that Haught worked had been thorough. She had still the look of a Rankene lady, however fallen.
She needed him, in this place. He persuaded himself of that. He needed her, desperately. At times he feared he was going mad. At others he feared that he was already mad.
And at the worst times he dreamed that she might wake and discover a corpse by her, the soul dragged back to hell and the body suffering whatever changes two years might have wrought in it, in its natural grave.
Day, brutal heat in the still air that settled in over Sanctuary since the rains. Shoppers at market were few and listless; merchants sat fanning themselves and keeping to the shade, while vegetables ripened and rotted and the remaining few fish did the same. There was trouble in the scarred town. The rumor ran up from Downwind and down from the hill, and all the byways murmured with the same names, furtively delivered.